North Clear Creek Falls

Author's Comments

The drive to the overlook is almost suspiciously easy. You pull off the Silver Thread, you walk maybe three minutes on pavement, and then the ground simply opens and a hundred feet of water is falling into a gorge cut from rhyolite. There is something almost theatrical about the reveal. No effort earned, just suddenly there. The photograph wants morning light. By afternoon the gorge fills with hard shadow and the falls themselves go contrasty in a way that no exposure quite resolves. But in the first two hours after sunrise, the light comes in sideways and even, the spruce around the rim hold their color, and the water reads as water rather than as a blown white shape against dark stone. Late May into June is when the volume is real. By August it has thinned to something more delicate, which is its own kind of photograph if you bring a longer lens and a neutral density filter and treat the falls as texture rather than spectacle. I have stopped here three or four times now, always on the way to somewhere else, and each time I have stayed longer than I meant to. The crowds never really arrive. You can have the overlook to yourself at seven in the morning, and the only sound is the falls themselves, which from a hundred feet above sound less like thunder and more like wind moving through something vast. Bring a wide lens for the full gorge. Bring patience for the long exposure. The falls are not going anywhere, and neither, on a good morning, are you.

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