Bell Rock

Author's Comments

Bell Rock is the formation everyone photographs from the highway, and that is part of the problem. The pullouts on SR 179 give you a clean profile shot that has been made ten thousand times, and most visitors stop there, take it, and drive on. The photograph worth waiting for is not from the road. It is from the pathway that circles the base, twenty or thirty minutes in, when the rock has rotated in your frame and revealed itself as something more complicated than a bell. I prefer the west side at sunset in late October. The red goes deeper as the light angles in low, and the vertical striations on the formation start to read like brushwork rather than stone. Morning has its own argument - the east face lights up first and the air is still cold enough to be clear - but evening is when the rock seems to hold the light rather than just receive it. A wide lens will tempt you and you should resist it for at least part of the shoot. The detail shots are where Bell Rock surprises me. The texture of the sandstone in raking light, the junipers gripping the lower ledges, the way a single weathered face can fill a frame and feel like an entire landscape. Crowds are real here and they do not thin much, but they tend to cluster at the base and the first plateau. Walk a little further. Wait for the last twenty minutes of light. The bus tours will be gone by then and the rock will be doing its best work.

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