Dead Horse Ranch State Park

Author's Comments

The name puts people off, which is part of why the place stays quiet. Dead Horse is not a dramatic park. There are no red rock cathedrals here, no slot canyons, no famous overlooks. What there is, instead, is water - real, perennial, year-round water - in a state where that alone is worth paying attention to. I come in late February, when the cottonwoods are still bare and the light is low even at midday. The lagoons go glassy in the first hour after sunrise, and the reflections of the bare branches against pale sky make compositions that feel more like ink drawings than photographs. By April the trees have leafed out and the whole park changes character, greener and louder, the birds everywhere at once. Both versions are worth the drive. The Verde itself is the quieter subject. Walk the Lime Kiln Trail down to the river and you are in a corridor that should not exist in this climate - mature cottonwoods, willows, the sound of moving water. In golden hour the trunks light up against the shadowed understory and the river itself goes the color of weak tea. I tend to work small here. A wide landscape rarely tells the truth of the place. A single cottonwood trunk catching late light, a heron's track in mud, the surface of a lagoon broken by something I did not see move - those are the photographs that bring the park back to me later. It is not a place that announces itself. You have to slow down for it to register. That is most of what I like about it.

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