SEQUIM — It was the snowstorm of January 2008 that led him to liftoff.
And the morning after, Dave Woodcock — a photographer whose favorite vantage point is from his two-seat Aviat Husky airplane, took off from the airstrip just outside his home northwest of Sequim.
He headed into the Olympic Mountains, flying above the clouds and above the North Olympic Peninsula’s namesake.
“There’s Mount Olympus in the morning sun,” he remembered. “The snow was just incredible.”
Woodcock, a 63-year-old dentist, has been a pilot for 40 years and a serious aerial photographer for about six.
What he saw on that sparkling day following the blizzard two years ago propelled him toward a grand project: From the Air: Olympic Peninsula is his 160-page collection of aerial views of this corner of the world.
Peaks, water, snow
Open it, and you’re swept off your feet, to soaring peaks, waters that come in myriad shades of blue, and snow so pure it looks like heaven must.
From the Air, which arrived last week in bookstores and gift shops across the Peninsula, lifts the viewer over it all.
We fly from the sands of Shi Shi Beach to the ice of the Blue Glacier, from the Elwha Dam to Quinault Lake, from Lake Crescent to Tatoosh Island, and to some 150 other gasp-inducing spots.
Woodcock learned this art by doing it — in his plane — with guidance from workshops taught by other professional photographers.
He’s flown all over the continent, from Manitoba to Utah and Arizona, capturing images of the landscape and its wild creatures.
But for this book, he said, he wanted to zero in on home.
Throughout the spring, summer and fall of 2008 he assembled and edited his aerial pictures, taking 1,000 to 1,500 shots in each three- or four-hour flight.
Then he discovered Olympic National Park: A Natural History by Sequim poet and nature writer Tim McNulty.
“I read it through, twice,” Woodcock said. Then he called the author and invited him to his home photo studio.
McNulty essays
Soon after McNulty laid eyes on the aerial photos, he began the essays for the book.
He’s a writer still deep into a long love affair — reinforced by research on all facets of history — with the Olympic Mountains.
Then, last spring, McNulty went flying with the pilot-photographer.
“As you can imagine, it’s an adventure. The side of the plane is open,” he recalled.
“It’s thrilling . . . just a wonderful opportunity to see again some very remote places I had visited and knew very well from the ground, and just have a whole new perspective.”
McNulty marveled too at the sudden smallness of the Olympic Peninsula.
Woodcock flew him from the Bailey Range all the way over to the Quinault Valley, then back over to Dungeness Spit, on one fast flight.
“It’s a small world,” down there, the writer realized.
Woodcock, for his part, says he feels at home flying over the shoulders of the Olympics.
He grew up in Bellevue and had a dental practice in Renton, but sold that to move to Sequim in 2006, where he and his wife Margie built a house with an airplane hangar near the Dungeness National Wildlife Refuge.
He works at the Jamestown S’Klallam dental clinic a few days a week, and flies about as often as the weather permits.
Two years ago Woodcock shot the photographs for Totem Poles of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe: The Art of Dale Faulstich, a book that’s available at Jamestown tribal properties and local bookstores.
Each aerial unique
In From the Air, each of the aerials in is one of a kind, Woodcock said. He looks for all of the elements to be aligned: eye-popping water color, snow clothing a mountaintop in an unrepeatable pattern.
“The book captures the 2005-through-2010 time frame, as far as what the glaciers and the sea coast look like, and the small towns and villages,” he added.
Woodcock hopes From the Air will act as a time capsule, documenting the Olympic Peninsula before global climate change, population growth and development reshape it further.
Together with McNulty’s essays, the images tell the story of how the how rivers of ice sculpted the mountains, carved the deep valleys between them and constructed a web of waterways flowing into the ocean.
Woodcock, illustrating the saga, revels in the process.
“This isn’t Google Earth,” with straight-down views only, he said.
Woodcock swoops between peaks, for perspectives on hidden lakes and waterfalls, and sometimes tips his wing up in order to lean out and get a vertical shot of the shoreline below.
His heavy Nikon camera in one hand, he shoots fast, now and again turning the plane to catch the right light.
These views, he quips, “you can’t see from the visitor center.”
Woodcock plans several book signings this spring.
Then “I’m going to keep shooting here,” on the Peninsula, “and get more and better things, and maybe do a second edition.”
For McNulty, working on “From the Air” fostered an even more intense appreciation of this place. In his writing, he sought to share that feeling, just as Woodcock shared it with him as they flew over the wilderness.
“I wanted to tell a good story, and gear it more toward the people who live here,” McNulty said. “This book is a celebration of the landscape.
“And who gets to see Mount Olympus in the wintertime? I’ve been there in the spring,” said the man who’s been exploring the peaks on foot for decades. But he’d never seen Olympus’ topmost angles, swathed in otherworldly white.
Woodcock’s desire to share these views — and to care for this part of the world are “the origin of the book,” McNulty said. “That really comes through.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.
