When I dug out my old photos a few years ago, they were starting to fade so badly that I just scanned them all and shredded the originals. A fair percent of them are on our "camp site" at http://waterhole.smugmug.com/.

I believe pics there through 2004 and some of the 2005 were originally film. There are a couple of years when I took fewer pictures, and they apparently got misplaced so there are a couple of "blank" years. (Having nothing to do with my participation in the festivities, of course.)

There were several photos in the early years that looked - and scanned - as blank black rectangles, but that Photoshop Elements pulled fairly decent pictures out of. If I'd know a little bit about how to drive PE back then they migh have looked even better, but even if they didn't look better it would have been a lot easier.

Growth of the WVA festival was pretty slow in the early years, since it was known almost exclusively by the local college/juco students (and a few of their boyfriends at other nearby schools). They had to graduate, spread out, and form clusters of drunken/drinkin' buddies^** to drag into it. They didn't reach critical mass and start to grow rapidly until ca 1985 - '90(?) or so - based on how hard it suddenly became to snag the good camp spots (personal observation, FWIW).

** Someone once tried to bet that more than half of the first-timers in the early years "came with a nurse" on their first trip. My first group had four nurses, one drug dealer (really - a legit professional) and a couple of bartenders. The local Winfield college did train (or at least start) lots of RNs and LPNs.

John