The Big Blue Bridges

Mar 01, 2021

I took the photo not long after shoreline ice had melted and river traffic was moving briskly alongside dozens of small cottages and boathouses on the island. I used my Canon 5D Mark iii with 100mm lens and developed it first in color, then revised it to soft brown-black & white to minimize the non-essentials of pale grass and a blue-pink morning sky. In this second rendition, it looks modern and more abstract in contrasting the light against dark.

We've lived forty miles east of here for twenty-five years in a unique geological region called The Driftless. We moved from a big metropolitan area (Miami) to the rural Midwest. LaCrosse is our big city, the place we come for amenities our small town doesn't offer. This was a special day for us and one that brought us to the river to watch the traffic. 

I'm standing alongside the east channel looking at the pair of bridges that carry traffic from downtown La Crosse, Wisconsin, to Barron Island where another span heads over the main channel to La Crescent, Minnesota. Here on the Wisconsin side both bridges are painted a soft medium blue, earning their local name as The Big Blue Bridges.

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