Riparian Preserve at Water Ranch

Author's Comments

I almost did not write about this place. There is a particular kind of pleasure in arriving somewhere ordinary and finding it is not, and Gilbert in February at six in the morning is exactly that kind of arrival. The preserve sits behind a public library and a parking lot, and from the road it looks like nothing at all. Then you walk in. The light here is the desert light I love most, the early winter version, slow to commit and pink at the edges. The recharge basins hold it in long flat sheets. Herons stand at the margins. I have watched a green heron work the shallows for twenty minutes without moving more than its eyes, and I have come away with a single frame that mattered. That ratio is honest. This is not a place where photographs come easily. It is a place where you wait, and the waiting is the point. Bring more lens than feels reasonable. Three hundred millimeters is the floor. The blinds are well placed and almost always empty in the first hour after sunrise, which is also when the birds are most willing to be themselves. By nine the joggers arrive and the surface of the water loses its stillness, and the light goes flat and ordinary, and the spell breaks. I have not told many people about this preserve. I am telling you now because it is the kind of hidden gem that stays hidden anyway, tucked into a suburb most photographers drive past on their way to somewhere more famous. Their loss. Go in winter. Go early. Let the morning take its time.

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