Rabbit Valley - Trail Through Time

Author's Comments

The first time I walked the Trail Through Time I was alone for the full hour and a half, and I have come to expect that. This is not a place that draws crowds. Two miles from the Utah line, off an interstate exit most people use for gas, the trail loops through Morrison Formation badlands where the bones are still in the rock. You can put your hand near a vertebra that has been weathering out for longer than anyone can really hold in their head. The light here wants to be photographed late. November afternoon, an hour before sunset, and the badlands begin to do what badlands do - the eroded folds catch the low sun on their western faces and go orange, while the cuts and hollows hold deep blue shadow. The contrast is the photograph. A wide lens for the layered ridges with the La Sals showing pale on the far horizon, and then a closer frame for the way juniper roots grip the cracked clay. I tend to spend more time on the details than the wides. The fossils themselves do not photograph dramatically - they are subtle, embedded, easy to walk past - but the surrounding stone has texture that reads beautifully in raking light. Cracked mud, iron staining, the small geometries of erosion. Get low. Use a longer lens than the landscape suggests. Come in spring or fall. Winter works too if the road is clear. Summer is genuinely dangerous out here and the light is wrong anyway, too high and too flat. The reward of this place is in its restraint. You will not come home with a postcard. You will come home with something quieter, and stranger, and older than almost anywhere else you can stand.

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