Box Canyon Falls

Author's Comments

You enter the canyon and the temperature drops ten degrees. That is the first thing. The second is the sound, which is not a sound so much as a pressure, water moving through a slot of quartzite barely wide enough to call a passage. Twenty feet across. Two hundred and eighty-five feet of vertical fall. The bridge puts you inside the geology rather than alongside it, and that changes how the photograph has to work. I do not think a wide lens fully captures what this place is. The canyon is too narrow, the light too compressed, and a wide frame flattens the depth that you can feel pressing in from both walls. I have had better luck working tight, finding the places where water meets stone and letting the long exposure smooth the chaos into something more like silk. June is when the snowmelt is pushing through hardest, and the spray is heavy enough that you will be wiping your front element every thirty seconds. Bring a cloth. Bring a jacket, because the canyon stays cool even in July when Ouray itself is warm. The light here does not come and go the way it does in open country. It filters down from somewhere above and arrives diffused, almost theatrical, the kind of soft cathedral light that makes a tripod essential and a fast lens secondary. Any hour works because no hour is truly bright. I tend to go midday when the sun is closer to overhead and a sliver of direct light occasionally finds the falls themselves. When that happens, you have about four minutes. Be ready.

Gallery