Soundwalk

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com Time now for Listening Spot . This is the third effort filed under the self-describing pseudonym, with the recipe being a long field recording accompanied by a number of musical movements comprising a greater whole. Put simply, it’s just meant to be more dreamy. For this outing we have left the Columbia River, an...

I’m trying something new: a short-form twist on my soundwalk formula, folding in my photography. So here is a pilot episode of sorts. I hope you enjoy this little string of impressions in sound and vision. Go on and hit that play button above. Let’s see what we can see, and hear what we can hear. It’s a densely overcast morning. As soon as I hit the trail, I’m checking out a Townsend’s Chipmunk. I...

This week we are crossing the river from Sauvie Island in Oregon to Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) in Washington state. The Northern tip of the island is directly across from where we are walking today: on recently restored trail in the refuge known as the Oaks to Wetland Trail. In 2019 hundreds of Douglas Fir trees were felled and removed from this area to encourage “oak release”. An o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com Today we have a bit of a departure. This 31 minute soundwalk was recorded at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge on January 28th, 2024. It is the flipside—both figuratively and literally—to the upcoming Oaks to Wetland Trail Soundwalk. I’m calling it Four Trains Soundwalk. Stretches of quiet and stretches of trai...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com I love oak trees. Here in the Pacific Northwest, our western forests are dominated by conifers, so oaks have something of an exotic look to my eye. It wasn’t always this way. Here in the Willamette Valley, oaks thrived in the rain shadow of the Coast Range. The entire 1.5 million hectare valley was not long ago d...

Rentenaar Road is just a flood-prone, gravel road through blackberry briars on the east side the Sauvie Island Wildlife Area. It does not look particularly special or inviting. But it is. It’s a portal to the kingdom of birds that have come to this island every winter for time immemorial. And, unless you’re there to hunt, it’s as close as you can get to the large flocks of Snow Geese, Canada Geese...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com We’re back on Sauvie Island for a special bonus soundwalk. Or maybe it’s a sound wade . Feel free to play the audio as you read on. A satellite view of Sauvie Island reveals a squiggly teardrop-shape island about the size of Manhattan. The upper half of that teardrop has an assemblage of lakes that resembles a he...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com Wapato Park is pretty great, partially because it’s easily overlooked and therefore never crowded. Its full name is Wapato Access Greenway State Park . It’s a sleeper park, the kind you stumble on if you like studying maps. The small gravel parking lot trailhead is on a dead end road, and easy to miss. Interestin...

In early 2022, before I adopted the soundwalk form for a my own musical inquiry, I released a recording called Rain Suite . It featured one long field recording— not captured while walking—with a group of self-contained instrumental movements of varying character in the same key. This is the definition of “suite” in music. It was very much a R&D precursor to my soundwalks. Indeed, it inspired my t...

It’s Oct 2nd as I write. The Oak Island area on Sauvie Island, near Portland, Or., closed to recreational use for the season yesterday. For the coming fall and winter, it will serve as a haven for the birds, save for the occasional hunters. Last winter, when I brought my Soundwalk podcast to Substack, I embarked on a series touching down at certain points in the greater area I referred to as the C...

And now we return to our soundwalk series on quiet spots in the city . This is part two of two. But before we get to that, I’d just like to take a minute to reflect on my journey to get here. On April 29, 2022 I released Chapman Beach Soundwalk . It was both extremely simple and, to me, experimental. It was, in a nutshell, a natural soundscape with musical soundtrack. I had no basis to believe tha...

Welcome back. It’s a new season of Soundwalk, the album series / podcast / newsletter that transports you to sound-rich natural places via roving binaural audio field recordings paired to a melodic, ambient score. In this short two-part season we are discovering serene soundscapes within the city of Portland, Oregon. Thank you for tuning in! See that dark green canyon in the foreground? That’s whe...

Read: Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 . When I turned twenty-one in 1994, I embarked on a 500 mile solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail across the state of Washington.   The Tread of My Soul is a memoir-meets-travelogue written from the trail.  Originally self published and shared with only a handful of family and friends, I recently dusted off the manuscript with the intention of sharing it wit...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com For our last soundwalk we are returning to the banks of Onion Creek, taking in McKinney Falls and its environs. It’s been a whirlwind four stop soundwalk tour of greater Austin, TX. Spring mornings in this part of the country are hard to beat! McKinney Falls lies within a 641 acre state park where Onion Creek plu...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com We have decamped from the inner rings of Austin to the suburb of Round Rock, TX. It’s April 7th, 2023. When I’m scouting a map for a good place to record a soundwalk, I look for trails through natural areas that have some sort of buffer in the way topography or distance from highways and arterial roads. In Round...

We are in Austin, TX again, at Onion Creek Metropolitan Park on a mild spring morning. It’s April 5, 2024. Onion Creek Greenway Trail follows a large “S” curve along Onion Creek on the semi-suburban south side of Austin, Texas. Located about two miles from the closest strand of Austin’s web of highways, it is one of the more serene riparian destinations within the city limits. It’s a popular place...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com I couldn’t really do what I set out to do yesterday. It was too hot in the city, so I went for an afternoon walk in Forest Park. I was interested to hear what it sounded like when the thermometer hit triple digits; something it rarely used to do around here. It was quiet. Did I say it was hot ? Instinctively I wa...

I had scheduled this for the U.S. July 4th holiday tomorrow, but I’m second-guessing that now and pressing send with unrestricted access. Perhaps this can offer some counter-programming to the sometimes overbearing or militant sounds of fireworks, or be a balm to those who are traveling and might feel unsettled right now. Why not make it a two-fer? I also just shared a spacious dawn chorus soundsc...

If a spark bird is a gateway to an interest in birding, then a spark place, I’d posit, is a gateway to a connection with nature. These places sometimes inspire writers. Think Thoreau and Walden, Annie Dillard and Tinker Creek, Aldo Leopold and Sauk County. My spark place in the last decade was Oaks Bottom, and for me it inspired music. It was an affair of convenience, to start. Conveniently locate...

Well friends, we’ve come to the end of another chapter in our Soundwalk journeys. For our final installment in the series on Mount Hood—Oregon’s tallest stratovolcano (at 11,249’)—we are taking in Larch Mountain. While technically just outside the confines of the Mount Hood National Forest, Larch Mountain offers a gorgeous view of Wy’east, the Native American name for Mount Hood. Right? Oh man, wh...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com Earlier this year I shared a soundscape field recording of an American Dipper singing on the Salmon River near Mount Hood at Wildwood Recreation Site. Wildwood Soundwalk is another recording that was made on that same day, Feb 20 of this year. It captures the sounds of walking over bridges and wetland boardwalks,...

Company Lake is a scrappy bit of woods and water on the banks of the Columbia River near Troutdale Oregon. Birds flock to it. I was going through some old files yesterday and rediscovered this 10 minute piece. I don’t have any memories associated with the composition—a minimal suite for piano, bells and electric piano I found surprisingly well paced and strong in the coda—but I recall my visit to...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com Castle Canyon is in The Mount Hood National Forest, a stone’s throw from the little hamlet of Rhododendron. It isn’t a what I’d call a canyon. It’s a wooded ridge with some striking volcanic rock formations rising out of it. Two steep creek canyons do cut troughs in the landscape on either side of this ridge, so...

There’s nothing dramatic about the Still Creek trail. It’s basically an easy-breezy trail that heads out over a ridgeline saddle from a campground set among old-growth Douglas-fir trees and a creek in the foothills of Mount Hood. Just a walk in the woods. The most dramatic part is the beginning. Winding through the stout tree pillars, we cross the surging Camp Creek. Hence, our walk begins with a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit chadcrouch.substack.com Timberline Lodge is a historic alpine lodge constructed in the late 1930s as a project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), high on Mount Hood where the trees thin out and glaciers loom large. Its lobby is dominated by a massive, soaring stone chimney which forms the c...