Fall classics

October 26, 2025

Lower Latah Creek, in October

A modest portfolio, infused with the angular light and emotions of autumn

I don’t write well enough to succinctly capture how low-angled light through a crystalline, rain-rinsed sky pulls on my emotions. Case in point, an outing with my two children to Green Bluff, north of Spokane, more than a decade ago, in that zone of time in which parenthood is like standing on a bank, gently shoving a canoe of your kids into their own waters. Green Bluff in the fall hosts a days-long, harvest festival, low-key except for the pumpkin cannons. There was a chill in the air, and low clouds in an otherwise infinite clear sky that seemed to stretch all the way past Mount Spokane to Canada. Audrey and Dev were goofy and funny and my spirit ached to think how much I’d miss seeing them daily in years to come. The memories I have from that day are still fresh, beautiful and crisply melancholic. Like autumn itself.

Tumwater Canyon, west of Leavenworth, WA

Grove on Elder Road in eastern Spokane County

Bubbles to the sky, through the water column, Spokane River, west Spokane

Skydiving Northern Flicker, plummeting from its nesting cavity

Fall color along the Spokane River in the Spokane valley

Rain washed oak leaf veins, west Pacific Avenue, Browne’s Addition, Spokane

Treeshine at the Hoyt Arboretum in Portland, OR

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Young mule deer buck in the rain

Big sky and fall foliage, west Spokane

—tjc