The Changing Skyline: Photo Documentation of 100 Years of Landscape Change in the Central Oregon Cascade Range

Jim O'Connor

U.S. Geological Survey

Register for the Zoom meeting

During the summer of 1920, Frederick William Cleator (1883–1957), a U.S. Forest Service recreational planner, surveyed and sign-posted the Oregon Skyline Trail. This trail, first laid out between Crater Lake and Mount Jefferson, was a predecessor of the Pacific Crest Trail, which decades later completed Cleator’s prediction of a recreational trail running from Mexico to Canada. During his survey, Cleator made several hundred photographs from peaks, forest glens, lake shorelines, and scenic vistas. These photographs show the landscape of the time. In the summer of 2020, with the help of many friends and colleagues, Jim O’Connor essentially retraced Cleator’s steps, re-photographing the landscape, many scenes 100 years to the hour from Cleator’s photos. These centennial matches show — in ways otherwise difficult to know or describe — the changing skyline, the changing forests, the changing glaciers, and the changing human uses of the central Oregon Cascade Range. 

Please join us at:

Worthy Brewing (eastside location)

In the Beermuda Triangle Room

5:30 pm social hour

7:00 pm presentation

COGS talk are free and open to the public -- all are welcome! Please join us for the social hour before the presentation.

All presentations are also live-streamed through Zoom. There will be a registration link at the top of this page as we get closer to the date of this presentation.