Paint Mines Interpretive Park

Author's Comments

You drive east from Colorado Springs across a stretch of prairie that gives no hint of what is coming. Grass, fence line, more grass. And then the land opens downward into a shallow draw and you are suddenly inside something that has no business being on the plains at all. The hoodoos are small. That is the first thing to understand. This is not Bryce and it is not the Badlands proper. It is a miniature, a pocket version of desert country tucked into a Colorado prairie fold, and the scale is part of what makes it work photographically. You can walk the length of the formations in an afternoon and never make the same picture twice. Late light is when the clay does what it came to do. The pinks and oranges I had read about are real, but they are also more particular than the photographs suggest. The color sits in bands, and the bands only sing when the sun is low enough to rake across them. An hour before sunset in October is when I have made my best frames here. The purples are harder. They want overcast, or the last blue minutes after the sun is fully gone, and they reward a slower kind of attention. Work close. The wide shot is available and worth making once, but the park gives more to a detail lens than most people expect. Erosion patterns, the way water has carved fluting into a single spire, the seam where white clay meets rust. Stay on the trails. The formations are soft enough that a single misplaced boot leaves a scar that will outlast the season. Bring water. There is no shade at all.

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