Dad's Pictures of Huntington & "Down the River"

Two sides of my family have ties to the property down on the Snake River near Huntington in Eastern, Oregon. Several of my family members were born down by that river and it seems just as many have died there, or the very least will have their ashes scattered there.

A couple times as a child we lived in Huntington and spent time down the river, but I never felt the connection to that land the way my father and grandmother and others felt. In fact, for some of us younger generations we actually feared the river road and property. It didn't take a genius to see that the road was old and dangerous, and the stories of close calls or actual deaths only reinforced it. And while I have always loved nature, camping and hiking...the city girl in me (even before I realized I was a city girl) always thought being so far from civilization was very undesirable. Of course this and so many other things are why my father loved it.

After Dad died and we first started going through his things, we found a ton of pictures he had taken of Huntington and the river property the last few years of his life. There are hundreds of them. He also painstakingly chronicled his re-model of what we call "the blue house". He really had a wonderful eye, even what should be the most dreary of construction pictures are expertly framed and in perfect detail. Here are just a few of the pictures, and even I (the city girl) have to admit the land is just gorgeous. Dry as hell and still isolated, but absolutely beautiful.