Junction Overlook

Author's Comments

Late October, just before the cottonwoods turn fully. That is when I came back to Junction the second time, after a first visit in summer that had not given me what I wanted. The trick of this overlook is that it asks you to read at two scales at once. Five hundred feet down, the canyon floor is a slow ribbon of gold and green where the trees follow the wash and the small farms sit in their clearings, and across the way, set into the opposite wall, First Ruin holds its quiet shape in the sandstone. You have to keep adjusting your eye. Golden hour is the answer here, and not the version of golden hour that flatters everything equally. I mean the last forty minutes, when the western light rakes along the rim and the canyon floor begins to lose the sun while the far wall still holds it. The cottonwoods catch fire from above. The ruin warms. The shadow line creeps up the opposite cliff at a pace you can almost watch. A wide lens is the obvious choice and the right one. But I find I make better photographs here when I commit to the layered composition rather than trying to hold everything. The fork of the two canyons, the trees following the water, the ruin small in the upper third. Let it be a landscape that takes a minute to read. Most people stop at this overlook for five and move on. Stay an hour. The light will give you something the quick visitors will not see.

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