Bismarck, North Dakota.

It’s harvest time in North Dakota and one of the annual activities of the season for a dozen years now, is Applefest, a celebration of autumn and a fundraiser for the Bismarck Cancer Center. Applefest this year was September 22 and 23 and as in years past was held at Buckstop Junction, a recreated pioneer village on the southeast end of the Bismarck metro area. Activities included everything from a pie eating contest to a 5K run and many more. Having recently stopped at a frontier village at Jamestown, on our way to Bismarck, we decided to check out Buckstop Junction. It was our good fortune to be there during Applefest 2018.The parking lots and streets into the area were very full and with all the people attending the celebration, we ended up walking quite a ways to the entrance, a historic building that is now a gift shop and visitor center. From the entrance, we could  hear music coming from one of the live musicians performing in the venue.

With a large crowd of people, the celebration attracted vendors with food and other items to sell. We did not starve given the choice of selections for snacking and lunch.

Our first stop, though, was where they were loading up for a hay ride. A tractor pulled a wagon around the village. I figured it would give me a quick overview of what places to stop and where everything was located. It turned out to be a short ride covering two long blocks of buildings. The map below was found on their website along with other background information for this post. Their home page is here.  Inside some of the old buildings are museums for specialized topics. I was disappointed to see the Capital Aviation Museum was closed, though there were a couple of airplanes parked outside the hangar building. It was nice that they were allowing kids to get in and play pilot.

One of the more interesting stops was the Gellner House. Built in 1906 near Goodrich, ND, the two-room residence was the birthplace and home of seven children in the Gellner family. One of the children, Erna Engelbretson, was there giving tours of the small farmhouse. As of the day of our visit, only three of the seven children are still with us.

A Standard gas station is prominent on the corner of Main Street and Edwinton and on this day featured a vintage tow truck and a much newer vehicle.

Directly across Edwinton Avenue from the filling station, a car dealership building is now in place. That building is not on the aerial view map above.

The only car on the lot was a beautiful 1958 Chevrolet Delray, a model produced as an entry level below the Impala and Bel Air. It is rare in that 1958 was the only year the Delray nameplate was available.

When you visit Buckstop Junction, if it’s open, be sure to stop in the basement of the Lewis Hotel. A large model train exhibit takes up nearly the entire basement area of the hotel. There were several members of the model railroading club available to visit about the specifics of this beautiful display. There were many other busy exhibits in the pioneer village. I’ve included a gallery of images for your review. In most browsers, you can click on an image to enlarge it and to scroll through the gallery.

About the images in this post: Since almost its inception, this blog has depended upon Adobe Lightroom for image manipulation. Now that Lightroom has gone to a subscription only model, I continue to use Lightroom 6, the last version available for one-time purchase. In recent months, I’ve been looking for tools that can perform on a par with Lightroom without the hassle of a monthly fee. I’m not quibbling the fee for Lightroom and Photoshop for me would only be about $10/month. It’s actually a bargain, but I simply prefer to purchase upgrades on my schedule.

A few months ago, I turned to Luminar by Skylum Software for my processing, though not perfect, there are functions, such as HDR creation that I continued to do in Lightroom. In early October, Skylum Software released Aurora HDR 2019. This post is the first post where all images were processed from their 3-bracket exposures to an HDR image with Aurora. I am finding that the last major job that Lightroom is doing for me is managing my image catalog, now well over 40,000 images captured since 2012 when I rekindled my interest in photography.

John Steiner