Lipan Point

Author's Comments

I have stood at Lipan Point in late October before sunrise, and I will tell you what I remember most. It was not the river, though the river was there, the Colorado catching the first light in a thin bend of silver far below. It was the layers. The way the canyon walls stack downward in time, each band a different color and a different age, until you reach the Great Unconformity and a billion years simply go missing in the rock. You can see that gap from here. You are looking at deep time made visible. The view faces east, which makes sunrise the obvious choice, and most mornings it earns the early alarm. The shadows pull westward across the canyon as the sun climbs, and for about twenty minutes the side canyons fill with directional light that defines every ridge and bench. The Unkar Delta sits down there along the river, a green flat where Ancestral Puebloans farmed nine hundred years ago, and in the right light you can almost trace the shape of it. What I have learned about photographing here is that the wide shot is the obvious frame and not always the best one. The canyon is too large to fit in a single image without flattening it. I do better when I work in pieces. A side canyon catching sun while its neighbor stays in shadow. The river through a notch in the foreground rock. The layered cliffs receding into haze. Come in the off season if you can. Winter mornings here are cold and almost empty, and the low sun rakes the geology in a way summer never quite manages.

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