A little more than an hour after 🌅 the daystar rose high enough to crest the headlands above Rialto Beach and the first rays of light burst through the treetops behind me, alighting on this tree and lit the peak of this monolith.

1/1/2015

📸

ONCE IN A LIFETIME PHOTOGRAPH

Click for a lightbox with these close-ups

The sea stack, battered by storms, fell in 2016. I’m 99% sure that this is the only photograph of its kind- with the first rays of light illuminating the tree.

📷

I set up camp in a nook just off the beach and then didn’t sleep a wink for the next twelve hours. We drank wine, cooked food, watched fireworks in far-off La Push and took photographs all night long.

I also captured “Halo,” an 8-minute long exposure of the moon and stars haloing the tree at midnight-ish. Four hours later “Moonlight Sonata,” - an orange moon setting in the V between two sea stacks that looks like a sunset with a sky full of stars. I owe Iron for that shot, I was almost catatonic from being cold and wet and tired and a little drunk in front of a blazing camp fire.

🔥

The next two days we hiked down the coast to second and third beach.

📸

Best New Years ever.