Hugh and Anne Paradise did a lot of blue highway exploring – most of it in the Northwest.   They lived in West Seattle at 1920 SW Graham Street beside a green and shallow dip that runs in line and near the center of the north-south ridge that begins at its north end with Pigeon Point.  For many years Paradise wrote what his editor described to me years ago as “poetic descriptions of the places he and Anne visited.”   Many of these were printed in Sunset magazine with photos also by Hugh.   I’ve not looked in the boxes of negatives for many years – and thank Byron Coney for sharing them now long ago – but, if memory serves and I remember the Paradise cars correctly, their adventures began after World War Two with a Chevrolet and years later they moved to a VW bus.   Some of the negatives are accompanied by contact prints and some of these have identifications written on the flip side, but ordinarily they are not dated.  These three are identified simply as, top to bottom, “Moses Coulee,”  “Moses Coulee school,” and “Moses Coulee Farm.”  The farm looks quite lively and the school is apparently one for ghosts.  [Click TWICE to Enlarge]

I have a vivid memory of dropping into Moses Coulee with my dad in the family Plymouth in the late 1940s.   After crossing the Grand Coulee and heading west, it was unexpected and so more exciting and memorable.   It was wonderfully lonely – like the top photo above.  I saw no farms.  The W.P.A. 1941 state guide “The New Washington, A Guide to the Evergreen State” described Highway 2 there so . . . “MOSES COULEE – Named for Chief Moses, like Grand Coulee it was also formed by glacial floods.  Going west, the highway at first descends gently along the coulee’s eroded upper walls, serpentines along a man-made shelf blasted from solid cliffs then levels off across the coulee floor. Nearly every color in the spectrum appears with the change in seasons and the play of light.  Leaving the coulee, the highway dips up and down through waving fields of wheat to the Waterville plateau.”