Devil's Bridge

Author's Comments

The bridge itself is a queue. I want to say this plainly because nothing about Devil's Bridge will make sense until you have made peace with it. By nine in the morning there is a line of people waiting their turn to walk out onto the arch and have someone photograph them with arms outstretched, and that line does not really break until late afternoon. So you go early. You go in February when the air is cold and the desert is quiet and the trail still has frost on it in the shaded sections. You go before the sun crests the ridge. What you are after, I think, is not the photograph of someone on the bridge. That image exists ten thousand times over. What you are after is the arch itself in the first light, when the sandstone goes from rust to something closer to ember, and the shadow of the span falls long across the slickrock below. The Schnebly Hill formation does something specific in early light that it does not do at midday. The red deepens. The texture comes forward. The whole formation looks lit from within for about twenty minutes and then the moment passes. Shoot wide from the approach trail before you climb up to the bridge level. Shoot the arch in profile rather than head-on. The head-on composition flattens it. From the side you get the span, the drop, the layered red rock receding behind, and a sense of scale that the straight shot loses entirely. Bring a portrait lens too if you have someone with you. A figure at the far end of the arch, small against all that stone, is the photograph most people walk past trying to make.

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