Courthouse Butte

Author's Comments

Bell Rock gets the attention. The guidebooks point at it, the parking lot fills around it, and Courthouse, sitting just behind, becomes the larger and quieter sibling that almost everyone walks past on their way to somewhere else. I find that suits me. The butte is enormous, more architectural than its neighbor, and the layered walls of Schnebly Hill and Supai sandstone read like pages of a book stacked five thousand feet into the sky. The loop trail circles both formations, four miles of relatively level walking through juniper and prickly pear, and the geometry of the butte changes constantly as you move around it. This is a trail to walk slowly. The east face takes the first warm light of the morning in a way that makes the layering almost three-dimensional, every band of red and ochre catching the angle differently. By late afternoon the west face is what you want, and the shadows that fall across the vertical walls at that hour are deeper than seems plausible for a desert. I prefer it in November, when the air is clear and cold enough in the early morning to keep most casual walkers in their cars until later. Spring is the obvious season and crowds reflect that. Winter, if you catch it after a rare dusting of snow, is the photograph of a lifetime, but I would not plan a trip around the chance. Bring a longer lens for the wall details. The temptation is to go wide and capture the whole butte, but the more interesting frames live in the cross sections, where geology becomes pattern and the scale disappears.

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