Black Ridge Canyons Wilderness - Rattlesnake Canyon

Author's Comments

There is a sentence I keep encountering about Rattlesnake Canyon - that it holds the second-largest concentration of natural arches in the country. The number is real and the arches are real, and yet the sentence does the place a small disservice. It sounds like a destination. Rattlesnake is not a destination. It is a long, slow effort to reach a quiet place, and the quiet is most of what you come away with. I have done it both ways. The 4WD road that needs to be a 4WD road, and the seven miles on foot from the Monument side. The walk is harder and better. By the time you arrive at the rim and start working down through the Entrada, the light has done something to the morning that no photograph quite holds. The sandstone goes from rust to gold to almost pink in the span of an hour, and the arches appear one by one along the bench, each in its own pocket of shadow. I have stood under three of these arches at sunrise and not seen another person. That is the part worth saying clearly. The photographs are good - wide compositions of arch and sky, tighter studies of stone curve and shadow line, the small abstract details where erosion has done its slow work. But the photographs are not really the point. The point is that there is still a place in Colorado where you can spend a full morning with nine arches and your own footsteps, and the only sound is wind moving through juniper. Spring and fall. Morning light. Carry more water than you think. Tell someone where you are going.

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