Slide Rock State Park

Author's Comments

In summer this place becomes something else entirely, a parking lot full by ten and the creek alive with families, kids screaming down the sandstone with that particular joy that only cold water on a hot day produces. I do not begrudge any of it. But I am not there for that. I come in October on a Tuesday morning, before the gate has any line at all, when the creek runs lower and the light comes down through the canyon at a slant that makes the red rock glow from inside. The slide itself is the obvious subject, and a long exposure of the water moving over that smoothed sandstone is worth making once. After that I find myself wandering up into the orchard. The Pendley apples are still there, planted in 1912 and somehow still bearing, and in fall the trees throw a different color into a landscape that is mostly red and green. Yellow leaves against rust-colored stone. That contrast does something I cannot quite explain. The canyon walls above the creek are where the light gets interesting in the first hour after sunrise. The sun does not reach the water yet, but it has already lit the upper rock, and the reflection in the still pools at the edges of the slide is what I keep coming back for. Cold morning, steam off the creek, the orchard quiet behind me. That is the version of Slide Rock most people never see.

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