English Boom and Back Again
I often hanker to travel afar to photograph dramatic landscapes and interesting people, and, realistically, most of the time I all I have is an hour or two so I have be content with our local haunts. Fortunately, I’m blessed to live in such a very photogenic part of the world with access to a diversity of scenery from sea level to the snowcapped mountains of the Cascades—all within a 2 hour drive.
It’s within a 15 to 20-minute radius from my house that is the sweet spot for snapping photos if I just want to get out of the house, and English Boom on the north side of Camano Island is one of my go-to spots.
May 29, 2022. Sunset at high tide.
May 27, 2022
May 27, 2022
February 11, 2022 Sunrise shot positioned for symmetry.
English Boom is a county park that’s great for families with kids, dog owners and anyone looking the mind, take in the sunset or do some birdwatching. I mostly hang out along the short beach, but there’s also sauntering quarter mile path that wends its way along and through the curving estuary inlets. At low tide one can walk futher east.
In it’s hey day English Boom stored over 1.5 million board feet of lumber that had been cut in the Cascades and sent down the Skagit River. English Boom seems to have been a way-station where cut trees were stored and then sent south to be milled (in Everett?)
There’s not a lot of archival photos of English Boom. All that physically remains is a rough organization of pilings—some short and covered at high tide and some standing ten to fourteen feet upright—arranged in lines or groups. It’s hard to tell what it looked like back in the day, with all that floating lumber waiting to be shipped south. At present, what remains, to my eye, is dynamic, iconic and sculptural.
Many of the pilings now have bird boxes attached frequented by sparrows, or used by seagulls and blue herons as sentinal posts. The avian activity adds greatly to the photogenic nature of this spot.
Honestly, I’ve never been to English Boom and been disappointed. With the unpredictable combination of light, tides, birds, and weather, there’s always something going on visually.
The other day I went to English Boom hoping to photograph the sun through the marine fog—I was hoping for some interesting color, maybe some birds, maybe some misty shots across the Skagit Bay to Mt. Baker.
You see, almost all of my visits to English Boom I’m facing north to the pilings and the bay, or east to the town of Stanwood and the Cascades, where, depending on the time of year, the sun rises.
On this occassion I’d missed sunrise, but with the sun arcing up in the south, and shining through the forest trees that border the park’s south side I witnessed an amazing light show as the inversion fog caught the sun light, creating a lightshow of dancing rainbow sunbeams, which went on for quite some time. So, for the first time all my attention was facing away from the beach. Unusual to be sure.
English Boom never fails to surprise!
THE KIT
Sony A7iv
Sony A7iii
Sony 70-300 4.5 G
Sony 35mm 1.4 GM
Manfrotto Tripod
Benro Bat Tripod
Dec 12, 2023: Sunbeams catching the marine fog.
Dec 12, 2023: Morning lightshow seen from across the wetlands.
June 30, 2022 Beachgoers and photographers at English Boom enjoying the sunset.
February 10, 2022 A typical gray afternoon in the PNW.
May 27, 2022
April 15, 2022 Sunset with the tide coming in.
February 8, 2022 More PNW gray.
February 9, 2022. Early morning misty sunrise with a number of pilings to the east, with the Stanwood smokestack in the distance.
February 9, 2022. A gray morning at low tide. Little did we know we were in for a long season of gray this year.
February 2020: One of a few shots from my first visit to English Boom in. This is typical preliminary scouting shot I take when I first get to a location and nothing really stands out at first. It’s not a bad shot, but it’s nothing to write home about.
Gallery
