Show Low Lake County Park

Author's Comments

Show Low Lake is not a dramatic place. It does not announce itself the way the rim country does an hour north, and it will not give you a photograph you have not seen before. What it gives you instead is a kind of quiet that feels rare in Arizona - a hundred acres of still water at six and a half thousand feet, ringed by ponderosa, the pines holding their long shadows late into the evening. I come here for the ospreys. From April through September they work the lake in a pattern you can almost set a watch by, and if you have the patience to sit on the west shore with a long lens and wait, you will eventually see one fold its wings and drop. The strike itself happens faster than you can react to. You learn to pre-focus on the water and trust the autofocus to do the rest. But the photograph I keep coming back for is not the osprey. It is the lake at the last twenty minutes of light, when the pines on the far shore turn black and the water goes gold and then pink and then a pale, exhausted blue. The west-facing shoreline is the obvious place and it is obvious for a reason. Bring something warm even in summer. The elevation pulls the temperature down quickly once the sun is gone, and the best frames come in the minutes after most people have already walked back to their cars.

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