What a year in the Palouse! According to one farmer we talked to, the garbanzo bean market took a dive, so many (many!) farmers planted canola instead. Canola is in the mustard family and is used to make Canola oil that you find in your local grocery store. It’s a small yellow flower that when grown as a crop blankets hills in bright cheery yellow. For photographers, it’s something highly sought out. I can remember years when we could only find a field or two and I’d be asking anybody and everybody if there was any canola around.

Well this year we didn’t need to search. Canola was everywhere. We could even see a giant field from our hotel in Colfax.
A favorite scene for many photographers has always been the Weber house, an old photogenic homestead nestled in a photogenic scene. Years ago I mentioned to the owner that if she ever decided to plant canola around the house, that photographers would gladly pay for it! Well it just took a change in the markets for the canola to come and I finally found the holy grail of Palouse photography. Well, I didn’t find it, but I did get to photograph it.

This year I had, unsurprisingly, a very small group for my workshop, just three hardy souls and myself. This meant we were pretty flexible. With that in mind we decided to make the long trek to Palouse Falls for a sunset shot. Since sunset was so late (9 p.m.) and the drive so long (about 80 minutes) we didn’t get up at stupid o’clock that morning, opting for some after sunrise locations instead, and skipped sunrise the next morning. And while we did get some shots, the colorful clouds that we wanted to appear to the south over the Palouse River appeared on the western horizon instead. Still, it’s a great location and a dramatic, if not at times nerve wracking place to shoot. To get a shot with the pool around the falls, you need to be relatively close to the edge of a cliff. And though to the causal observer, it might have appeared that we were too close, we really weren’t and were staying safe at all times. (But just try photographing the Milky Way from the same location like I did on my own in 2019. That can be a bit freaky.)

As I mentioned, there was lots of canola and we could have spent several more days searching out the best scenes (it was a year where you could be picky). I feel for my fellow workshops leaders that had to cancel and feel grateful that the Palouse is only a six hour drive away for me. I’m also grateful the Whitman County, WA has very, very few cases of Covid-19. One local said that there was something like seven and six of them were in the same family. So a pretty safe place to be.
The good news is that it looks like a lot of canola will be planted next year too. Just not around the Weber House. Not next year anyway.

Speaking of next year, my Palouse workshop will be June 15-20. If you’re interested, send me an email and I’ll put you on the early notify list. I’ll be posting that trip soon!
Here are just a few of the sites we saw in the Palouse this year: