There’s something dangerous about closing a chapter, especially one built out of 12 months of dirt roads, sleepless nights, shutter clicks, and the kind of Oregon backcountry hallucinations only too much caffeine and bad trail decisions can provoke. And now it all funnels toward one last destination: Sauvie Island, a place calm enough on the surface to lull you into a false sense of pastoral security. Pumpkin patches, flat fields, quiet riverbanks, but underneath it all, there’s an ancient hum, a pulse in the soil, something old watching from the tree line.

Twelve adventures in twelve months. A lunatic’s gamble. A photographer’s pilgrimage. A full year of chasing storms, mountains, and roads that looked like they wanted to kill us. And now here we are, roaring toward the finish line like some cracked-out Lewis & Clark with tripods instead of muskets.

Sauvie Island isn’t the grand finale people expect, no massive peak, no cosmic lake, no lightning ripping between mountain ranges. But that’s the beauty of it. The place is deceptively simple, a quiet battlefield where the sky sprawls wide and low, and the landscape forces you to confront yourself with no distractions. Just open space, migratory birds screaming overhead, and enough room to let the year finally catch up with you.

We’ll wander the beaches, the abandoned corners, the wide-open farm roads where the fog drags itself across the ground like a tired ghost. We’ll set up the cameras and let the river light crack through the lens like a final sermon. And somewhere between the shutter clicks and the smell of wet earth, we’ll realize we actually did it, one adventure a month, every damn month. Rain, heat, forest fire haze, mystery weather systems, broken sleep schedules, caffeine overdoses… and we still dragged ourselves out there, chasing whatever strange vision pulled us forward.

This trip isn’t just a finale.

It’s the victory lap, the calm exhale after a year of sprinting through the wild edges of Oregon like we were being hunted by time itself.

And when Sauvie Island gives us that last photograph, the final frame of this year-long saga, it won’t be an ending.

It’ll be proof.

Proof that we lived the story, walked the dirt, stared into the unknown, and kept moving.

Twelve adventures. Twelve months.

A whole year carved into images, words, and half-insane memories.

Sauvie Island is the last page, sure.

But endings are just excuses to begin again.