I know I’ve shared this before. But this moment lives rent free in my mind.

By the time we hit Whistler’s Bend, my boots felt like concrete and my brain like a TV stuck on static. Toketee Falls had left its roar echoing in my skull. Watson Falls hammered it in deeper. Hours of chasing water and gravity, lungs burning on switchbacks, and now here I was…. Alone, stalking shadows around a campsite outside Glide, Oregon.

I wasn’t expecting anything. Just walking the perimeter to shake the road out of my legs, the smell of campfire still hanging in my clothes. Then I saw them.

Two deer.

Frozen. Watching. Ears like antennae scanning the cosmos for trouble.

Something primal clicked. Camera up. One slow step. Then another. The grass hissed underfoot like it was warning me off, but I kept moving. I wanted the shot and hell, I wanted to see just how close I could get before one of us flinched.

The hill steepened, and my breathing got louder in my own head. That’s when I saw the plateau above.

A whole family of them. Six deer grazing in loose formation, utterly indifferent to my presence. It felt less like wildlife photography and more like espionage, me creeping through the understory like a man on the edge of discovery.

The camera was no longer a tool. It was an extension of my nervous system, every click of the shutter synced to my heartbeat.

In those moments nothing else existed.

No headlines. No deadlines. No angry voices or traffic snarls or screens full of static screaming for attention. Just the quiet ritual of creatures doing what they’ve done for thousands of years grazing, watching, surviving and me, holding my breath, trying to burn the moment into silicon and glass.

This was the opposite of city noise. This was truth.

The kind of truth that doesn’t shout. It whispers in the trees, in the rustle of leaves, in the eyes of an animal deciding if you’re predator or ghost.

I didn’t want to leave.

But eventually the deer drifted away, vanishing into the brush like smoke. The spell broke. The forest exhaled. And I walked back down to camp, lighter somehow.

Tomorrow there’d be noise again. But for now, there was only stillness.