Cave Creek Canyon

Author's Comments

The drive in tells you something about what you are about to see. You come through Portal, which is barely a town, and then the road bends and the rhyolite walls rise on either side and you understand that you have entered somewhere that does not quite belong to the rest of Arizona. This is a sky island canyon, and it behaves like one. The light is different here. The air carries sound differently. I come for the cliffs more than the birds, though I understand why the birders outnumber everyone else. Cathedral Rock catches the last hour of sun in a way that turns the rhyolite from gray to something closer to rust, and the shadows that work down the canyon walls in late afternoon are the real subject. The geometry is vertical and patient. A wide lens flattens it. I have had better luck working tighter, isolating sections of cliff where the light is doing something specific, letting the scale build through detail rather than sweep. Fall is when I keep returning. The sycamores along the creek go yellow and the maples turn unexpectedly red, and against the warm stone the color holds in a way it does not in the higher, drier parts of the range. Stay at the research station if you can. The canyon at night is Bortle 1, and after the last light drains from Cathedral Rock there is another photograph waiting, which is the cliffs in silhouette under a sky that most Americans have never actually seen. Wait for it. The hour between last light and full dark is the one that justifies the drive.

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