Steptoe Butte Revisited

I visited Steptoe Butte in 2013 on my annual camping trip with Bruce Gregory and Steve Johnson, and liked it enough to revisit with my wife, Linda, this May.  This post is about 6 weeks late because I’ve been on another annual camping trip.  Having fun gets in the way of timely posts.

The view from Steptoe Butte varies from month to month as new crops are planted and others are harvested.  On this visit, we saw patterns created by combinations of bare ground and growing crops.  The air was quite hazy, so these photos have been processed to increase clarity and contrast.

We stayed fairly late, so we were treated to some great sidelight touching beautiful farms nestled in green valleys.

The Palouse region of Washington is a remarkable area of gently rolling farmland.  We enjoyed photographing it from below (see previous posts) and Steptoe Butte gave us an entirely different view from above.  Large curvy fields became wonderful abstracts when viewed from here.

Since we were shooting across the tops of the fields, the best abstracts were usually fairly narrow, so I have cropped them.  But this image had two complementary abstracts that I think look pretty good together.

Sometimes I wonder if the farmers arrange their fields just for the benefit of photographers.  The view of these curvy fields from Steptoe Butte is just phenomenal, and we thoroughly enjoyed our visit to the Palouse.

However, I did have one complaint.  Steptoe Butte is a state park, and whoever is in charge of this place should be ashamed of the poor condition of the park.  We were there on the Memorial Day weekend, so it was crowded, and the garbage cans were overflowing and the restrooms unusable.  There are potholes big enough to swallow a Toyota.  Come on, Washington, you can do better than that.

Please note that my photos are copyrighted and must not be used without my permission.