Fruita Paleontological Area - Book Cliffs Backdrop

Author's Comments

The Book Cliffs do not announce themselves so much as they accumulate. You notice them first as a horizon, then as a wall, then as something stranger - a two hundred mile run of layered stone that follows you the entire way across the Grand Valley and refuses to end. From Fruita they sit to the north like a long held breath, and the relationship between the desert floor and the escarpment above is the photograph. You need both. The flat scrub in the foreground, the cliffs lifting behind, and the sky doing whatever the sky is going to do that evening. Golden hour is when the geology becomes legible. The layering, which reads as a single beige mass in midday flatness, separates into bands of warm ochre and deeper rust as the sun drops, and the shadow that pools at the base of the cliffs goes a clean violet that I have not quite seen anywhere else in Colorado. Winter is underrated here. The low angle of the light holds longer and the cliffs catch color for what feels like an extra half hour. I work from the Kokopelli trailheads north of the interstate when I want the cleanest foreground. No power lines, no fences, just the desert running out toward the wall. A wide lens flattens the scale in a way that does not flatter the place. I have had better luck with something closer to normal, letting the cliffs occupy the upper third and trusting the eye to understand how far away they really are. Stay until the last light leaves the top band. That is the frame.

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