Boynton Canyon

Author's Comments

Boynton is a canyon that does not announce itself. The trailhead sits in plain sight, and the first half mile is unremarkable enough that I have watched hikers turn back, convinced they had taken a wrong turn. They had not. The canyon withholds. It opens slowly, and the reward for staying with it is a kind of progressive revelation that most red rock landscapes do not offer. I come here in November, in the morning, when the east wall catches first light and the west side is still deep in shadow. That contrast is the whole photograph. The sandstone goes from cool violet to warm rust over the course of maybe forty minutes, and the line between shadow and stone moves down the cliff face slowly enough to watch. Wide lens for the canyon mouth. Longer glass for the kachina spires off the spur trail, which deserve their own quiet attention. The deeper you walk, the stranger it gets. The vegetation shifts under your feet without ceremony - desert scrub gives way to manzanita, then to ponderosa, and by the time you are at the back wall you are standing in a forest that has no business being in Arizona. The canyon ends in a kind of natural amphitheater where sound behaves oddly and the light comes down filtered through pine. I do not photograph the back wall much. It feels like the wrong response to that particular place. I sit instead, and I let the morning do what it is going to do, and I walk back out with the light now fully on the canyon and the spires holding their color against a sky that has gone the deep blue of a Sedona winter.

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