Fort Churchill State Historic Park•Nevada

00:00     Title
00:14     Fort Churchill State Park
13:33     Buckland Station State Historic Site
16:45     Fin
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Fort Churchill is a relic of the old west that has a lot of history to share. Oddly enough, the main attraction for casual web perusers is the surreal appearance of this antique adobe stronghold. The location next to the Carson River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains is very picturesque and a landscape artist would simply fall in love with this setting. Better still, right in the middle of the river valley lies an old eroded adobe fort that looks like a Salvador Dali masterpiece. This all adds up to a feast for the eyes, which is a good enough reason for featuring Fort Churchill in a modern imaging video!

The heavily eroded adobe structures have a way of capturing attention when browsing pictures on the web and it does not take long to wonder how this old fort came to be. This area was first occupied by native cultures far longer than a millennia. Fur trappers and explorers were the first europeans to become familiar with these parts. As everybody knows, the 1849 gold rush prospectors started a mass migration the likes of which had never been seen before. When the enormous Comstock Lode was discovered nearby in Virginia City, that really opened the flood gates and as can be imagined, the native people faced plenty of turmoil and corruption at every turn. 

Things started getting dicey along the California Trail when highwaymen and native reprisals jeopardized supply lines and the well being of pioneer settlers. The U.S. Army took matters in hand and established a stronghold next to the Carson River. The army supply lines were also stretched to the breaking point back then, so it did not take long for a successful native reprisal to occur. Eventually the adobe fort complex was completed and served to regulate this part of Nevada for almost a decade. 

Fort Churchill was abandoned shortly after the Civil War and the salvageable materials were sold to a rancher named William Buckland. This enterprising individual soon inaugurated his ranch as a Pony Express Station down by the Carson River and some of the old fort materials were used for this purpose. 

Fort Churchill and Buckland Station are pictured in this video, since visiting both of these historic sites is considered to be a complete tour. My brief historic overview is encyclopedic in nature and it only breezes over the facts. Far more insight can be gained by visiting these two Nevada State Parks in person, because there are so many fascinating old west California Trail stories to be learned.

On a side note, I was given a Nikon D90 for my job as a quality control technician at a heavy industrial site in 2009. I first used that camera for work related material through 2011. I quit the job to do 4 years of culinary arts college and did nothing but food photography during that period of time. After graduating in an advanced degree program in 2015, I set out to take a little tour of the west. This was when the Destination West website project first took shape. Fort Churchill was one of the first travel destinations that I photographed and the images are still worth sharing. 

With the D90 I often filmed while using the automatic modes with the intent of solely concentrating on framing. I soon learned that there are quirky ways to take control of the autofocus system even in full automatic mode. Slightly shifting the aim and refocusing achieved a better lock on the subject. In doing so, I pushed things a little further and started holding the holding the camera at extreme angles with a wide angle lens to produce a distorted fisheye effect. I literally tried this at every opportunity while at Fort Churchill and Buckland Station, since it was a fun novelty at that time. This explains why some of the images look distorted, but they are interesting nonetheless.