Point Imperial

Author's Comments

The North Rim asks more of you than the South. You drive longer, you arrive less easily, and the season is shorter. Point Imperial sits at the far end of all that effort, eight thousand eight hundred feet up, looking northeast into a country that does not really resemble the Grand Canyon at all. Marble Canyon cuts a narrow line below. The Vermilion Cliffs hold the far horizon. The Painted Desert reads as color more than form, a wash of red and bone laid against the eastern sky. I came here first for sunrise in late September, expecting the canyon and finding something stranger. The light arrives from the east-northeast and rakes directly across Nankoweap drainage, and for maybe twenty minutes the shadows do work that no other overlook on either rim can quite match. The depth becomes legible. The cliffs separate from each other. What had been one wall at dawn becomes three distinct ridges by the time the sun is fully up. The crowds do not come. Most visitors who make it to the North Rim drive Cape Royal and skip the spur, which is their loss and your gain. Bring a wide lens for the full sweep and something longer for the Vermilion Cliffs in isolation, because they reward compression. Come in early October if you can. The aspens on the drive in are turning, the air is thin and clear, and the road closes soon after. You will not get another chance until May.

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