Black Canyon South Rim - Sunset View

Author's Comments

The Black Canyon does not photograph the way it looks. Stand at Sunset View in person and the depth is genuinely vertiginous, twenty-three hundred feet of dark schist falling away to a river so far below it sounds like a rumor. Then you raise the camera and the gorge flattens. This is the canyon's old trick, and Sunset View is the one overlook on the South Rim that has an answer for it. The answer is the light. Late September, an hour before the sun drops, the canyon begins to fill with a warmth that does not belong to the rest of the day. Because the viewpoint faces west, the river catches it first, a thin ribbon of bronze in the shadow at the bottom. Then the walls. The schist is almost black at noon and almost gold at sunset, and the moment between is what you came for. Maybe ten minutes. Sometimes less. I shoot wide here, wider than I usually would, because the panorama is the subject and any tighter crop loses the scale that makes this place itself. A long exposure after the sun is gone will pull color out of the sky that your eye has already stopped registering, and the river at the bottom will smooth into something almost mercurial. Bring a tripod. Bring a jacket even in summer, because the wind comes up the canyon as the air cools and it has a long way to travel. Arrive early enough to choose your spot. The overlook is small and the good positions fill in the last half hour. Once you are set, do not move. The light will come to you.

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