Whidbey Island resident Teresa Pate sent this abundant view of Snoqualmie Falls to Jean Sherrard in response to Jean’s handling of other photos of this 270-foot cataract that appear in Sherrard’s and my book, “Washington Then and Now.” Pate explains, “The picture has probably been in the family 75 to 100 years.” Embossed directly on the photograph is the name “Evans,” perhaps the studio signature of David and Francis Evans who, in the early 20th century, ran Evans Photo and Art Shop in downtown Seattle.

Of the falls’ many thousand recordings this view is wonderfully appealing for putting the cascade “in full force” behind the delicate profiles of a fallen forest snag and two men, we imagine, in the grip of the sublime. To repeat this mildly telescopic effect, Jean used his 80mm lens for the “now.”

Above the roar of the falls Jean got the attention of his subjects by waving his arms. (His subjects, by the way, are also his students at Bellevue’s Hillside Student Community, a private school founded by Sherrard’s parents in 1969.

Readers will note that on the right of both views the same rock shows in the pool below the falls. Sherrard explains: “After triangulating the iron-shaped boulder evident in both photos, I surmised that the original photographer was standing well out into the river, probably on a log, as there’s no structure today that would bring me near that perspective. Usually the rocks below the falls are slick from the misting water, but on this day the wind blew up the canyon toward the falls, leaving the approach safe and dry.”

Several more remarkable older photos from the archive:

And a few more NOW pix to illustrate our trip down to the river: