It sits on a hill above the Columbia River near Goldendale, Washington. A somewhat unlikely and unexpected apparition on the landscape,you scratch your head and ask: “Isn’t this supposed to be in England?” If you watch a lot of PBS programming, you might even add: “Wiltshire, England?”
But there it is: Stonehenge, or at least a reproduction of the United Kingdom’s Stonehenge. Could it be that you are making a list of must-see tourist attractions for your next Great American road trip the with the vanload-o-kids? Well there's the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas; the Corn Cob Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota; maybe the 15-foot, 3,000 pound ball of rubber bands that’s being stretched into art by a guy in Delaware; and yes, the Stonehenge replica, sitting there in the sand and sagebrush in Eastern Washington state.
Built by wealthy railroad executive Sam Hill, the Washington state Stonehenge was dedicated in 1918 and finished 12 years later. One might mock this structure as an oddity and might write-off Sam Hill as a crackpot, but I’ve learned that Hill was a pacifist and constructed his Stonehenge as a memorial to lives lost in WWI. Sounds to me like Sam Hill had commendable intentions.
We made a point of being there for sunrise. Photographers know that the kind of light we seek for our landscape images is generally found early or late in the day. Hence we were there in heavy jackets and fleece pants, shivering in the spooky pre-dawn desert chill as the first light hit the massive stone slabs of our Stonehenge. Shadows lengthened and --though there were no Druids there that day-- photographic alchemy was afoot. A full moon was setting in the west. All we had to do was open the camera shutter and magic made its way onto the film.
