Alaska 2024: Roll 3 - Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument
Alright, first off, I knew this roll was going to be rough when I decided to use it. To give some context, here is the backstory.
At work we had a collection donor contact us about donating some cameras that he used as a working photographer in the 1980s and 1990s. I picked up a couple of boxes of gear and when I was cleaning things out I found two expired rolls of Fujifilm NPH 400. These had been horribly stored in a southern Oklahoma garage for a couple of decades so there was little chance that they would be anything useful but I decided to give them a try.
This first roll I exposed at ISO 160 to try and give it a fighting chance. You can see that it didn't really turn out.
The film had an incredibly thick fog from years of bad storage and it was a challenge to scan and get anything from these images.
But it was honestly not a complete loss. The day was mostly a miles day with us driving from Rapid City, South Dakota to Great Falls, Montana. This was a 535 mile day that ended up taking the whole day to complete.
Most of the morning was overcast and rainy but when we got to Little Bighorn and had lunch, the sky opened up and it was nice for the rest of the day.
We took a route that Kristy, Ripley and I had taken a few years back and stopped at a few of the same stops along the way. The weather threatened to turn bad but it didn't really materialize other than a few sprinkles.
When we arrived in Great Falls, there was a bit of confusion when we checked into our hotel with the workers being very short staffed for the evening. This would turn out to be our least favorite hotel on the trip as it wasn't very nice and had a strange smell to the rooms. Live and learn.
The next day Kristy, Ripley, Kenai and I went for a really nice run along the river. The river trail actually allowed us to run in a large loop which is pretty rare for us on our runs.
The goal for the next day was to get to Waterton Park where we would be staying the night. I tried to arrange this day to have only about four hours of driving so we could explore Waterton Lakes National Park.
Along the way we stopped for some pictures of Chief Mountain and the 30mm lens made things look way off in the distance.
We stopped for lunch at an overlook for Water Lakes and we had the chance to see a rainstorm brewing in the distance and move to give us a quick shower.
I think the best image from the roll was this last photo taken inside of the Suburban while we ate lunch. It is an example where "best" is really on a strange scale compared to other rolls of film.
Once we arrived in Waterton Park we dropped off our stuff and went out to explore, but that is another roll of film.