Nailed It
It took six hours, a drone, a flash, and a team of seven. Here's how he got the shot of his dreams
The strip of northern Oregon just south of the Columbia River is said to contain North America’s largest concentration of waterfalls, with seventy-seven major falls in four hundred twenty square miles, and one of its most celebrated is Punchbowl Falls. The thirty-five-foot waterfall is powered by Eagle Creek, which contains thirteen falls in the five miles and thirty-two hundred feet it drops from its headwaters to where it meets the Columbia. At the lip of Punchbowl, water sluices through a ten-foot narrows, picking up speed and forming a beautiful flume that attracts kayakers and photographers alike.
Riley Seebeck is both—kayaker and photographer—and he long imagined creating a dramatic, spectacular picture of a boater running Punchbowl. The winter of 2023-24 brought inconsistent rain and snow to the Pacific Northwest, challenging the predictability of water flows, but in March 2024, with talented kayakers from all over converging on the Little White Salmon Race in nearby Bingen, Washington, he and his crew went for it.
How and when did you first get the idea for the photo?
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