Adams Falls

Author's Comments

June is when this small canyon makes its case. The snow above Grand Lake is letting go all at once, and East Inlet Creek arrives at the ledges loud and full of itself, throwing spray into the moss until everything within twenty feet of the falls is wet and luminous. The walk in is almost nothing, three tenths of a mile, which means you will not have the place to yourself. Come early. By eight the morning light is still soft enough to hold detail in the white water, and the canyon walls are deep enough that direct sun does not reach the falls until later anyway, which is a gift. This is shaded, even light for most of the morning. Long exposures want a polarizer here, not for the sky but for the rocks. The granite is dark and slick and full of green, and without a polarizer the highlights on the wet stone will flatten everything. With one, the moss reads the way it actually looks in person, which is to say almost unreasonably saturated. The falls themselves drop fifty-five feet through a narrow slot, and the most interesting photographs are not the wide ones. The compression of the canyon makes a wide frame feel cluttered. I work tighter. A section of cascade, a single ledge where the water folds over itself, the place where a fern has rooted in a crack and somehow survived the spray. Detail work. The whole falls in one frame is the postcard, and the postcard is fine, but the photograph that holds up is smaller than that.

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