Horace Sykes looking down into the dark and deep waters of Dry Falls Lake.  Below or looks at the Vista House that are more revealing than those included with Our Daily Sykes #464.  (Black and White postcard used courtesy of Drew Miller. – Click to Enlarge)

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Dry Fall and a glimpse of Dry Fall Lake too.   The environs can be learned below from two of the thousands of recordings taken from the visitor’s interpretative center or near it.  A brief study below should find the features of the cliff that Horace Sykes shows above.  An alternative is penultimate to the bottom where Mrs. and Mr. Giezentanner pose for real photo postcard artist Ellis with some of the Dry Falls Park observation shelter showing on the left.  The Giezentanners are described as the caretakers and lecturers for the park.  The couple stands on a short bridge that leads to a monolith that is exposed and feels so.   That fenced prospect appears in Jean and my book “Washington Then and Now” on pages 144 and 145.  Below the Giezentanners is the billboard that for many years romanticized these rocks and imagined falls.   The natural interpretation of the place and its historical forces has changed some since the board was raised.  You may easily find contemporary interpretations using the net.   There is among them a documentary – with animations and working geologists – that about six years ago was shown on PBS.  I have lost the title.

The only identification with confidence here is “Lust for Life,” the 1934 novel by Irving Stone pulled from the brilliance of the letters that Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo.  It is the orange book on the bottom of the pile resting on the table in the lower slide.  I suspect that the persons remembered here are both relatives of Horace Sykes – ones living in Oregon.  I surely do not know that and there is little chance that these two delicate figures will ever be identified.  However, portraits like these are very rare in the Sykes collection, and the most of them – the ones that are identified –  are of members of his family and a few of their friends, most often at Christmas.  (Click to Enlarge)

Among Horace Sykes slides are one hundred or so copies of paintings.   These two are identified with names attached to their frames.  The names, however, are either wrong – actually misspelled – or no longer in use.  First what the unknown painter has named Crossley Lake is Cosley Lake.

Joe Cosley was a hunter-trapper who frequented this area and later worked as a park ranger once his hunting ground had been nationalized as a protected park.  Cosley Lake is about 10 miles north of what was called Lake McDermott, the name used by the painter on his frame, before it was changed to Swiftcurrent Lake.   It took awhile to sort this out.  There are quite a few postcards of McDermott Lake on line but none that I found indicated where in the park it was.   One of the cards described it as near Mt. Wilbur and Mt. Grinnell, so I went looking for them.

Soon I was confident that the little lake named Swiftcurrent, with the largest hotel in the park (Many Glaciers Hotel – and  many rooms too), was once named McDermott after a lumberman in the late 1890s.  And I also found the waterfalls at the western end of the lake.    The name was changed from McDermott to Swiftcurrent in 1928, perhaps because the creek was so named and also the popular mountain pass and trail that cross the divide and lead one to Lake McDonald on the west side of the park.  Swiftcurrent lake is only about a quarter mile wide when measured east-west directly across from the hotel.  The painting also looks west and a little south.  One half mile behind the painter is the western end of the six-mile long finger lake, Lake Sherburne.   An earth dam was built at its western end and the lake is now a reservoir for ultimately irrigating the farm lands of Montana and Canada to the east of the park and to the sides of the Milk River.

This returns to the rapids shown below as “Our Daily Sykes #435 – ‘Rapids on the Snake, Perhaps’.”  This is a wider view and also for me a subject suspected, not known.  (Click to Enlarge)

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Since I am certain that I have seen this butte before during one of my Google Earth drives – probably through southeast Utah –  I have titled it the Temporarily Lost Butte, confident that I will find it again.   And yet I have just tried again and failed.  I looked mostly to the south of Moab, Utah.  That is where I imagined that I saw it earlier.  But now I have come upon so many buttes that resemble this one that my hide-and-seek is like confused by the sprite or hobgoblin or leprechan who has tied ribbons around every tree in the forest.  Still I will stay with “temporarily” and expect to come upon it again and learn its confident name.

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On April 22, 2010 for “Our Daily Sykes #10” we printed an addendum that joyfully announced that we had, at last, figured out the location of a subject nearly the same as this, but just down the road – although in that early installment of our Sykes’ routine, there was no arterial with a comforting yellow stripe as there is here.  There is also practically every comparison between the clouds in them.  That is, they were photographed from within moments of each other, and yet each is uniquely satisfying.   (Click to Enlarge)

Here Sykes visits one of the most frequented prospects for Mt. Rainier: looking west from Chinook Pass, at an elevation that’s a few feet more than 5,440.  With this detail he contrasts the rough rocks of Governor’s Ridge (with Mt. Governor near the scene’s center) with the swelling compressions of the Emmons Glazier beyond it.  Emmons is part of the most used climbing route to the top of Rainier.  There’s also a glimpse of the pointed Little Tahoma near the upper-left corner.  At 11138 feet it is the fifth highest mountain in the Cascades, after – and in order from the highest – Rainier, Shasta, Adams and Hood.   Little Tahoma is a young mountain, only about 500 thousand years.  Sykes moved some to the north (right) for the wider look at the same subject, below.  (Click to Enlarge)

Born at Fort Walla Walla in 1883, “Skinny” Gen.J.M Wainwright IV, returned home after enduring  three years as a prisoner of Japan during World War Two.  “Skinny” was distinguished as the highest-ranking American POW during the war.   He and his troops surrendered to the Japanese forces at Corregidor.   He first saw action in the Philippines much earlier, in 1908-10 during the Moro Rebellion.   “Moro” stood for Muslim – those of the southern Philippines who resisted first Spanish and then American rule.   Skinny returned to the Philippines in 1940 to make ready for the Japanese invasion of 1941, and the battles that took Wainwright and thousands more into captivity.  Throughout he felt like he had “let his country down,” and was surprised that once freed and back home he was treated as a hero.  On Sept. 13, he got his own ticker-tape parade in New York.  Horace Sykes does not tell us when he was also celebrated his home town, Walla Walla.  [Click to Enlarge]

Horace Sykes moved to Seattle from Oregon in the late 1920s as an expert on fire safety.  He had come to work for Northern Life soon after the insurance company had moved into their new highrise at the southeast corner of Third Ave. and University Street and Third Ave.  It is now called the Seattle Tower.  I have always assumed that at least a good percentage of Horace’s picturesque landscapes were photographed while he was on trips examining insurance claims, and yet this and a photograph of an ice plant destroyed by fire are the only instances or “evidence” of the pain and destruction the insurance examiner must have been very familiar with in his subjects.  This is one of two photographs taken of this unnamed woman, most likely sometime in the late 1940s.  It is the easier one to look at.

A small collection of clipped cartoons figure in Horace Sykes collection of Kodachrome slides – at most a dozen.  Here are seven, which I have titled.  A title is a kind of second caption.  Two of these date from 1955, which is a year before Horace’s death.  I am old enough to remember all  these cartoon artists, although I could not name them – never could.  It is worth remembering when they were published.  But I’d not know what insights follow – easily.

On what wide river is this with a railroad – it seems – on the other side?  Click to Enlarge (and study).

This Double Arch – its descriptive name – is one of the more popular of the 1000-plus arches that span southwest skies – most of them in southern Utah.  It is conveniently close to its own Double Arch parking area – a half mile hike round trip.   Google Earth notes, “There are no guardrails or fences to prevent visitors from exploring directly beneath and through the arches.  The area was used as a backdrop for the opening scene of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”  On its visit to Utah ca. 1950 the vacationing Dorpats made it to Bryce and Zion but not the Arches.  This failure continued with Indiana Jones.  I saw none of the sequels, and so missed the Hollywood premier of Syke’s Double Arch.

I remember this from my only visit to Grand Canyon.  It was ca. 1950 with my parents and next oldest brother David.  This is the North Rim, which is easily determined with a Google Earth visit to the North Rim dead end on Highway 67.  Actually, the end of the road is quite alive with a big lodge – which I do not remember – and many other structures.  The elevation is about 8100 feet, one thousand feet – or so – above the south rim at Grand Canyon Village, which as the condor flies is about ten miles to the left.    Driving between the two rims is a long trip.  Most visitors choose the lower south rim only.  My dad wanted to see them both.   The “head” showing here is about one-and-one-half miles distant and about 100 feet lower than the lodge and, we presume, Horace Sykes prospect.  (Click to Enlarge)

In the grand watershed that feeds the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River there is a Little Colorado River that reaches the big canyon thru a canyon of its own with sheer sides and a narrow width that one might imagine flying over in an aerodynamic motorcycle.  There are signs warning responsible adults to keep impetuous children and pets away as one approaches this gash in the Arizona desert, for without the signs there is often no sense that there is a canyon until you reach the very edge of it.  Persons suffering from Vertigo will want to stay in some Flagstaff Motel.   The Little Colorado River comes out of that part of New Mexico that does not resemble Mars, which is the western part at its belt-line.  There are forests, lakes and mountains and this Little Colorado comes to life in them and flows northwest thru serpentine wiggles until it approaches the Arizona border, where it starts to move more earnestly in the direction of the Grand Canyon.  I found the Little Colorado while using Google Earth to look down from space upon artist James Turrell’s Roden Crater, which over decades he had been arranging with tunnels and other reclamations into a natural light show.  Jean, who is one of the rare ones who have visited it on the ground, gave me the directions.  It was during my own inspection from space that I noticed that Roden Crater was but a few stones throws from the Little Colorado, and what is more only three miles due west from its Grand Falls.  Here I request that the reader open Google Earth and find the place.  It is 30 miles northeast of Flagstaff New Mexico.  The falls are represented-pictured with several citizen snapshots.   And it is easy to find Roden Crater as well although it is not named it is the only crater in a small field of them that shows a path leading into it and a man-made earth-work in it as well.   It a downright surreal with a 2001 uncanny caste.  The Grand Falls of the Little Colorado River are grand, or can be when the river is swelling, which in this arid landscape is not often.  The occasional flash flood makes them spectacular.  The falls are roughly 150 feet high and 500  feet wide, and there is one big step included that is about 70 feet wide.  By comparison Niagara Falls is about 170 feet high and it falls without a step.  Through its sections Niagara  is about 3000 feet wide.  It is also much wetter and whiter.   The Arizona landscape thereabouts often has a red caste to it, and when these Grand Falls on the Little Colorado get splashing the coloring resembles a shake made from a mix of Pepto-bismol and coffee, a tint familiar to persons with caffeine addictions who are also plagued with bad digestion.   I only recently came upon the attached waterfall in the collection of Sykes Kodachrome slides.   In my urge to find locations for his subjects I hoped that this might be a detail from the Grand Falls of the Little Colorado River.  Now I confess after comparing this look at this waterfall with those on Google Earth of the Grand Falls, well, I think that it is not.  Once again we are left clueless by a Sykes’ subject, although not hopelessly so.  (Click to Enlarge)

Like a nascent Nile temple or a sprouting Mt. Rushmore for Supreme Court Justices in sepia, or near it.  (Click TWICE to Enlarge)

Some of Syke’s slide, like this one, came to a surreal condition by reason of some chemistry along the way.  The blue is too blue, and the focus soft.  What to say about the rusting landscape?  But note the monolith centered on the far horizon.  Did Horace mean to stage it all around that isolate effect?  When grabbed in detail, like below, some of these rougher slides appear like gouache canvases. (Click to Enlarge)