Springerville Volcanic Field

Author's Comments

The first time I drove US-60 east from Show Low toward Springerville, I did not realize I was crossing a volcanic field. The land reads as grassland, vast and gently rolling, and only after the second or third dark hill in the middle distance does the pattern start to register. Cinder cones. Hundreds of them. Two million years of basalt gone quiet and grassed over, scattered across twelve hundred square miles of high plateau like a slow exhalation that never quite finished. This is not a dramatic landscape in the way the canyons are dramatic. It does not announce itself. The cones are low and dark and widely spaced, and the grassland between them does most of the talking. What you are photographing here is scale and repetition - the way one cone leads the eye to another and another, the way the plateau holds them all in the same gentle palm. Late September into October is when I find the field at its best. The grasses go gold, the air loses its summer haze, and at golden hour the cones throw long eastward shadows that finally give them dimension. US-191 north of Springerville is the drive I keep returning to. Pull over often. The composition is almost always wider than you first think. A quiet word. Much of the land here is private or tribal, and the etiquette is simple: stay on public roads, photograph from the shoulder, do not cross fence lines. The field has been here for two million years. It is not going anywhere, and there is no photograph worth making that asks otherwise.

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