Joel Dinda's photos with the keyword: gorge

Taken at West Virginia's Babcock State Park with my Nikon N90s in late September of 1999. Compare this photo Joan took last summer from a nearby location. We're looking down the Manns Creek Gorge toward the New River. After a severe downhill run, Manns Creek joins the New at what used to be Sewell, where I'm told there are ruins of coking ovens. I've complained from time to time about the high-speed film I've been scanning from my photo collection, but that's a little misleading. My pattern, historically, was to pick a specific film each year and shoot almost exclusively using that product until the next year. This means that I've made photographs with all sorts of films--so the scanning problems I've had of late were largely because I've been choosing to scan years with difficult films. This photo, in contrast, came out very nicely.

From the National Park overlook--here's another of the inevitable pictures from West Virginia. I've shot two or three dozen similar photos of the very pretty bridge across the New River, including this one . Less fog than usual, this time.

The incomparable arch which superceded Fayette Station's bridge, from Fayette Station. This picture also shows the start of the series of rapids--the third is called "Old Nasty"--below the big bridge. ========== A sense of scale: New River Bridge is 900 feet above the river, and the span is over a half mile long. An engineering marvel, and a beautiful structure. Another scale: A century ago there was no bridge. Logging companies were taking the trees, and there were mines--and mining towns--every few hundred feet. The valley was filled with smoke, and the river was polluted. Two hundred years ago this area was an unsurveyed wilderness. The place was considered to be nearly inaccessible. Photo taken July 21, 2004 with my Nikon N90s.

A view from one of the overlooks the National Park's constructed near West Virginia's New River Bridge. The rafts on the river are about to land, as the lower New River raft trips generally end at the bridge(s). While they don't show well, there are CSX lines on both sides of the river at this point. The haze is normal. That's the Fayette Station Bridge. The old road across the gorge begins (speaking loosely) near where I took the picture, jackknifes down the gorge literally beneath the viewing station, crosses the river, and makes a similar trip up the other side. Much of this trip is now restricted to one-way traffic, but until 1977 this skinny road carried vehicles in both directions across the gorge.