Walking uphill from my campsite, seeking temporary refuge from gnats and flies, I came across the remains of an abandoned radar dome atop a mountain. This was about 18 miles East of Colville, WA on a steep dirt road from the Tiger Highway, SR20. At the time, 2007, I was on a motorcycle trip without camera, and I wanted to return for some photography since then. In 2013 I finally got transportation, weather and camera gear aligned and made my photographic return.

According to an informative web page by Mary Ellen Jefferson-Long at the Northeast Washington Genealogical Society ( http://www.newgs.org), the 760th Radar Base was established in 1950 to detect incoming Soviet bombers and was obsolete and abandoned in 1960. Four-wheeling up the hill to this site and climbing through the various buildings, you get an impression of the immense resources carted up to mountaintops and then abandoned after a few years. The warning system against a Soviet nuclear strike seemed like good idea at the time, but the whole “mutually assured destruction” concept was some high point in mass psychosis.

Decades later and stripped of salvageable equipment and materials, it is an ideal location for paintballers, who have given it wonderful blobs of random color. This site offered two approaches to imaging. One was to capture the color blotches of paint with a digital camera; the other was to use B&W film to convey some sense of the craziness of the Cold War. Of course, the main impediment was the lack of light inside the rabbit warren of hallways and rooms. For this I brought a number of battery-powered flashes that I could place in various rooms. The digital camera allowed me to set the lights for the film camera. Besides the difficulty of framing and focusing in near-total darkness, the main problem was getting the flashes to trigger off of the radio and optical trigger units. The perfect environment for many hours of adventure photography, in other words!

The color images here are from my Nikon D90 with minimal post-processing. Paired with these are the B&W images from scans of 8x10 prints made from the TriX film in my trusty (old) Nikon FE2. Three additional B&W images are added in April 2015 from a follow-up trip, showing new graffiti. I've added seven more color images from July 2018 that show a much more sophisticated graffiti. And finally (?) there's an exterior wide angle shot with the 4x5" view camera from August 2020.