Big Lake

Author's Comments

People do not associate Arizona with this kind of water. That is part of why I keep driving up. Big Lake sits at nine thousand feet in the White Mountains, ringed by spruce and fir, and on a calm morning in late June it looks like something I should have flown to Montana to find. The surface goes glass before sunrise. That is the window. Maybe forty minutes between the first usable light and the moment the wind picks up off the meadows and breaks the reflection into pieces. I have learned to be there in the dark. The drive up from Springerville is slow, and the access road only opens once the snow has cleared, sometimes not until June. Once you are at the lake, the eastern shore is where the reflection holds longest. The treeline doubles cleanly in the water and the sky behind it goes through a sequence of pinks and pale blues that I have never quite been able to predict. Some mornings the color is restrained. Some mornings it is absurd. Bring something wide. The lake is large enough that a tighter lens will lose the scale, and the photograph that works here is almost always the full sweep - sky, treeline, mirrored treeline, foreground water. Elk come down to the shallows on the south end at first light if you are patient and quiet. Fall is the other season worth the drive, when the aspens further down the mountain have turned and the air at this elevation is already cold enough to see your breath at five in the morning. That cold is what makes the stillness. Wind needs a temperature gradient, and before the sun comes up there is not one yet.

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