After seventeen dedicated photography trips out to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula for my long-term project about the region, I’m getting to the point where I’m starting to wonder what the end might look like and when that might be.

With a project like this, I want to go well beyond the iconic locations and put together a series of images that, together, show what it feels like to deeply explore the wild places within this northwest corner of the Northwest.

But one problem I’m running into is that the more I explore, the more I realize that there is still left to see. And with a region this large, that’s not a hurdle that I expect to be able to ever overcome. I could—and I really mean this—very easily spend a few more decades continuing to explore Olympic National Park and the surrounding wild places and never again see the same scene in the same light.

But, projects like these deserve to have an end point, a stamp of finality, so that they can be packaged up and put out into the world. As of now, the project exists in digital form only, which is great in the interim, but the ultimate goal is to turn Olympic into a photo book. And no matter when I decide that the project is done, ready to exist in bound, printed form, there will remain photos out there that I could have made, that would have fit in with the book, potentially making it even better.

So we’ll see…

In the meantime, I’d heard that a few areas on the east side of the peninsula were filled with rhododendrons that bloomed in the forests each June and I knew that I wanted a photo of that for the book. So, I headed out to the Peninsula for a few days this June and lucked out with some great conditions that led to an image I really love. I had a little extra time, so I did some exploring and photography around a few other new-to-me areas as well.