Chiricahua National Monument

Author's Comments

The first time I drove the road up to Massai Point I kept stopping the car. Not for any single view but because the formations kept rearranging themselves as I climbed, hoodoos appearing in the middle distance and then resolving into entire forests of stone as the elevation gained. Twenty seven million years ago this was ash and fire. Now it is a city of spires, and the light moves through it the way light moves through any tall and narrow place - in slabs, at angles, never all at once. The canyons here are not the canyons of the Colorado Plateau. They do not open in great red bowls. They tighten and twist, and the rhyolite catches light in tones I still struggle to describe - something between rose and ash, depending on the hour. Late afternoon in October is when I have made my best frames. The shadows separate the spires from each other, and what reads as a wall at midday becomes individual columns by five o'clock, each one casting its own long line east. Stay for the night if you can. The campground is the trick - the scenic drive closes at sunset, but if you are camped inside the monument, you wake to the silence that only a Bortle 2 sky leaves behind. I have stood at the lower pullouts after midnight in November and watched the Milky Way rise directly behind a rank of hoodoos that looked, in that light, less like geology and more like an audience. Long exposures want a moonless window and a windbreak. The detail shots want morning, when the eastern faces are warm and the western ones still hold blue.

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