Fall Color to Cape Blanco

A sleepless hour at 2 AM. A new expedition idea. The annual fall color drive with Bob. The Umpqua maples. Lunch in Reedsport. A location scout at Cape Blanco. Dinner in Bandon. Home by way of Florence. A nightcap at Suds.

Umpqua color, Cape Blanco light, and the road home by Florence

Events and activities that occurred on Tuesday, October 27, 2026

The day started well before dawn, when I woke a little before two and couldn't get back to sleep. A cup of tea and a snack turned into a long think about festivals, and why the last two left me feeling more restless than full. The answer, when it came, was simpler than I expected. Festivals sort of bore me. I'm there first for the discovery, and once I've done the tour and scoped the place out, I'm there for the people. That's where it gets harder, because I'm seldom inclined to put myself in someone else's face, least of all a stranger's. My best evenings are the ones where people sit down, whether around a family campfire, in the passenger seat of Bob's road trips, or at the Salon. Even at RINSE my instinct was four chairs and a fire pit.

That led to an idea I liked enough to write down at 2:39 in the morning. Instead of wandering a festival looking for stories, I could be the place people wander to. Picture a small station with chairs, a fire pit and a sign that says something like sit, tell me how you got here, and leave with a portrait. Walking up to strangers with a camera has always felt a little like interception. An invitation is different, because whoever sits down has already said yes. By breakfast it had become a declared expedition, a smiles.photos theme camp for the spring burns next year.

Then came the road. Bob and I make a fall color drive every year, and this year's route ran down OR-38 along the Umpqua, where the bigleaf maples were doing exactly what we'd come for. We stopped for fish and chowder at the Harbor Light in Reedsport, then followed 101 south past Coos Bay and Bandon to Cape Blanco. The weather cooperated, sunny with a stiff north wind, and the afternoon light on the headland was the reason for the detour. I spent that hour scouting for an upcoming shoot, walking the cliff by the lighthouse, the beach to the south and the mouth of the Sixes River, and taking quick reference frames at each to see how the light falls.

Half of Bandon closes on Tuesdays, which we learned one locked door at a time, so dinner ended up at Alloro, a small wine bar in Old Town. It was spendy but good, and I filed it away as the right kind of place to come back to after a long day on the coast. We took the most direct way home, north on 101 to Florence, then inland on 126 across the Coast Range and up to Corvallis. The drive after dark was quiet, the kind of road that leaves plenty of room to think, and I used most of it to do exactly that.

Back in Corvallis I stopped at Suds to decompress before going home. Maddie and I talked about walking, and she told me about a hike at Silver Falls over the weekend. A little later Bob, still in a road-trip frame of mind, sent along a list of the extreme points of the United States, which felt like the right footnote for a day spent driving out to the far western edge of Oregon.

It was a day that started with a question in the dark and ended with an answer of sorts, and somewhere in between there were maples, a lighthouse and a good friend in the passenger seat. Too much caffeine on the road meant sleep came slowly, so the evening wound down in the chair with a familiar movie, letting the coastline settle.