Photographs dating back to Washington’s first state geologist in the 1890s were saved over the years as a combination of printed photographs, slides, and film. These images capture the history of the geologic survey, the state’s mining and mineral resource exploration starting in the 1920s, before and after images of Mount St. Helen’s in the 1980s, and more. As a trial preservation project in 2015, a combination of photographs, slides, and film were scanned, amounting to the digitization of about 3500 images.

Since then more boxes of photographs, slides, film and other media have been found in storage or donated to the state for archiving. We hope to eventually have all of our physical image database available here.