Volition Brewing unveils new mural with Scott Rinckenberger

Two North Bend businesses have come together for a 26-foot-by-7-foot homage to their local mountains.

North Bend’s Volition Brewing Co. and Scott Rinckenberger Photography have partnered on a new mural in the brewery’s taproom, a black and white image of Snoqualmie Pass backcountry. After having neighboring businesses for a couple of years, Volition co-owners Lucas and Jamie Haines reached out to Rinckenberger in hopes of enhancing the taproom’s blank walls.

“We’re trying to find a right way to represent the community, represent North Bend downtown and an area we all love and live in,” Lucas Haines said.

The black and white image depicts “iconic parts” of the local mountains, Rinckenberger said, including Snow Lake, Chair Peak and Snoqualmie Mountain. Haines said the photo’s peaks speak to the adventurous spirit embedded in the brewery.

“Our motto here at Volition is that all adventures lead to Volition,” he said. “It just kind of feels like, after you’re done doing all that backcountry stuff in an area we know and love … you can come here and still enjoy the serene landscape, as well as relax with a beer and recover.”

Volition had a choice of several different images for the mural, but this one was special, as Haines and his wife, co-owner Jamie Haines, have spent a lot of time adventuring in the area.

It’s even more special now since the photo is specific to Volition Brewing.

“It’s an iconic image that he hasn’t used anywhere,” Lucas Haines said. “He made sure that whatever image we got was unique to our space and not a composition that he sells or is in a different location.”

The mural consists of multiple black and white photos, assembled into one large image to maintain the photographs’ integrity. When shooting panoramic images, Rinckenberger will sometimes take up to 30 photos of a single landscape and then stitch them together on the computer.

“Then you get a resolution that’s five or 10 or 15 times what a single image would be, even out of a professional digital camera,” he said. “That level of resolution allows me to really scale these up to a very sort of life-size scale and not have any image degradation.”

Rinckenberger does a lot of work in black and white, for a couple of reasons.

“One, I really sort of enjoy the extent to which taking ‘color out’ allows people to focus a lot more on just studying the composition and studying the light and sort of paying attention to elements,” he said.

Additionally, “the winter snowscapes are almost, by nature, a monochromatic environment. I feel like viewing that photography helps to appreciate the sort of nuance that comes with a snowy landscape.”

The owners of the two businesses have come to know each other well: the Haineses have a couple of Rinckenberger’s pieces on display in their home, and Rinckenberger said Volition has become his “favorite watering hole.”

Plus, they share a great love for the great outdoors.

“It’s a really wonderful symbiotic relationship,” Rinckenberger said. “It’s really just wonderful that so many of these businesses sort of share passions with myself and with the community at large, in terms of a real love of the mountains and of being in the outdoors.”

(From left) Jamie Haines, Scott Rinckenberger and Lucas Haines pose for a photo with the new mural at Volition Brewing Co. Photo courtesy of Jaime Haines