Slumgullion Pass and Earthflow

Author's Comments

There are landscapes you photograph and landscapes you simply try to understand, and the Slumgullion belongs more to the second category than the first. From the overlook on Highway 149, at eleven and a half thousand feet, you are looking down at a hillside that is moving. Not quickly, not visibly, but moving all the same. The earthflow has been sliding for centuries and the color is what announces it - a yellow-green stain through the dark forest, the kind of mineral hue you do not quite trust until you see it in person. I came through in late August, mid-afternoon, and the light was working against me in the way high-country light often does at that hour. Flat, bright, unsentimental. But the slide itself does not need flattering light. The color does the work. A wide lens captures the full path of the flow from ridge to valley, and that is the photograph most people make. The better one, I think, is tighter - somewhere in the middle of the slide where the yellowed clay meets the living trees at its edge, and you can read the slow violence of it. Fall sharpens everything here. The aspens on the surrounding slopes turn and the contrast against the earthflow becomes almost theatrical. Combine the stop with Windy Point a little further along the byway, where Lake San Cristobal sits below in its own quiet argument with gravity. The lake exists because of a different lobe of the same slide. The whole landscape is one long geological sentence, still being written.

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