1983 | Lake Havasu, East Shore
Mark Kimball was very enthusiastic about the natural scene and studied wildlife management before taking over a rustic fishing lodge on an ideal spot on the Elk River in Oregon. Before that, he had been enamored with the 8x10 camera, and strove to take pictures of the unspoiled landscape. In fact, he made a bet that he would never take a picture of a human-altered scene. I collected my winnings early on – he had scrambled along a lovely salmon stream during low water and made several pictures of a deep, clearly primeval forest, but not long after, he sent me a picture of a road washed away from a fine hillside, appending our landscape photographers’ mantra, “Geology in Action!” He then confessed that he had indeed lost the wager.
Not long after, we made a hot trip in June to Hoover Dam to enjoy the spectacular managed spilling of 50,000 cubic feet per second of the Colorado River through the dam’s spillways. That entire structure was really “built” – that volume of floodwater in this big early snowmelt barely flattened the circumference of the huge circular openings of the twin 500,000-CFS spillway tubes. The next day, after a 100-degree overnight in the so-called Valley of Fire, we drove on to Lake Havasu. Mark set up his big camera to photograph in his preferred manner, but he was looking at a constructed reservoir and a pumping plant on the far shore. We thought the forlorn palm trees were nifty, but I’m not sure that Mark knew that he was standing on a groomed subdivision site, surrounded by the altered West.