Cascadia
The magic of a deeply connected ecosystem
The rain is the first thing you learn about this place. It's not weather here, it's the engine. It falls on the mountains, soaks into the rainforest, fills the rivers and runs back out to the sea, and every living thing on this coast is somewhere on that journey, waiting for their share of it.
This is, of course, a huge ongoing project, with no possible completion. This is my relationship with the Pacific Northwest, and now my boys' too. Somewhere along the way, as the years went by and my life bloomed, it became a fatherhood project as much as a photography one.
Out here I get to share with my sons the world before anyone explains it to them, tide pools, bear tracks, and epic wildlife migrations, and watch them start to work it out for themselves.
It's the best classroom I've ever found, and I'm learning as much as they are, not only about the incredible land and ecosystems that we live in, but also about parenting and the wonderful journey that is.
We're not the authority on this coast, nobody could be. Thats why this isn’t just a fact regurgitation exercise, but an ongoing diary of a family documenting this coastline from our perspective.
We're just out in it together, exploring, photographing, and letting the place do the teaching.
There are big themes we return to again and again, but like the rivers the salmon navigate, the story keeps branching into tributaries, smaller and stranger tales that amaze us almost daily. Some we follow for an afternoon. Some turn into the chapters below. This is more than a life's work, and we really have only just begun…
I landed in British Columbia in 2019, right before the global Covid-19 pandemic. At that point, we had no kids and no mortgage which allowed me extraordinary freedom to explore. Coming from Norway and seeing the similarities in landscape and coastal mechanisms, I quickly became enthralled with the flora and fauna of this wild frontier.
