Thursday, October 8, 2009

What I Did Today

Today I took my class on a field trip to Bannack State Park. Bannack was a gold rush boom town in the 1860s, and the first territorial capital. Although the boom ended after a few years, the town remained a viable community until the 1940s. Today, it's a ghost town, but a particularly well-preserved one where visitors can wander around in and around the buildings. I brought my camera along to take some shots of the students for our department website, and took the opportunity to snap some other pics as well, including these.

This is the curving staircase in the Meade Hotel, which looks an awful lot like all the hotels one sees in old West movies (well, without the furniture or people).

This is a stand of trees on the banks of Grasshopper Creek, which is where the gold was found, and still resides if you've a hankering to do some panning.

It was a nice sunny day, giving me plenty of opportunity to find shots of high contrast like this old can in the window.

Another stand of trees, this one out on Yankee Flats, south of the creek. Something about the light created a hazy effect, so one might almost imagine the ghosts of prospecters hovering around their old neighborhood.

Here's a view looking out the back window of one of the abandoned houses.

And one last shot of Grasshopper Creek. We really lucked out with the weather, as it's been overcast and snowy for most of the last week, while today it was sunny and relatively warm. Next week, I'll have another chance to practice my night photography, as I'll be heading down to Las Vegas for a long weekend-- kind of the opposite extreme from the ghost town visited today.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Beautiful pictures, John! I remember our trip to Bannock several years ago. It is a beautiful place. Mom