Amber & Joe & Florence

I posted photos from Amber & Joe's engagement session in Stites and Kooskia on my site. (Once you're there, click on any image to start a slideshow.) Amber is a good friend (and classmate since 1st grade) and it was great meeting Joe. They're getting married in November in Mexico, so I suggested an engagement session for fun while they were visiting Idaho and they were up for it. I'm pretty happy with how the photos came out, too.

This coming weekend I'm going to do shoot the Chief Lookingglass Days Pow-wow and a woman I went to school with asked me to cover some special events during it for her family, so I am stoked to hopefully get some good, intimate shots there.

My parents and Keith and I drove up past Grangeville to check out a cabin we've reserved for us and Amanda and K2 in September. After we checked out the cabin we drove to Florence, which doesn't really exist anymore, but it's a former boom mining town in BFE Idaho.

It's all gone now, we only saw remnants of a couple cabins and all of the ditches that had been dug for mining. But at one time, the population here reached 9,000! That's amazing considering the very remote location and the fact it was the late 1800s. Gold fever, baby.

The cemetery was the most interesting part. It's been restored somewhat, as in new markers have been made for some of the graves. Though one sign we read said one person per day died on average, so there has to be more bodies buried that they just don't know about and/or have lost track of...

There were also indentations left with a sign that explained "Exhumed Graves of Chinese Miners." Hopefully that means the bodies were returned to their country of origin. There was a semi-circle of holes like this apart from the rest of the grave markers.

Related: Kooskia's internment camp during WWII has been in the news a lot lately as archaeologists from the University of Idaho are working there.

A lot of the "new" grave markers said "Unknown" but the ones with names and dates showed people who died there who came from Canada, Georgia, Kentucky. All to find a fortune mining. I don't think it worked out like they thought it might. But you have to admire the sense of adventure that brought them there.

There are also a lot of dredge ponds left over (see above) where moose are likely to be, but we didn't see any this time.