Toroweap Overlook

Author's Comments

Sixty miles of dirt road is the price of admission, and the road itself is part of why Toroweap remains what it is. I have driven it in a high-clearance truck with extra water and a spare tire I hoped not to need, and I have arrived at the overlook to find no one else there. Not a soul. On the South Rim, that sentence is impossible. Here it is ordinary. The drop is the thing. Three thousand feet, almost straight down, to a bend in the Colorado where the river looks impossibly small for what it has carved. Most canyon overlooks give you distance and layered ridges. This one gives you verticality so absolute it changes how your body feels standing near the edge. I do not photograph it well. I am not sure anyone does. The scale refuses the frame. What I have learned to do instead is turn slightly. Vulcan's Throne sits to the west, a cinder cone with old lava flows spilling toward the rim, and in late afternoon the volcanic rock takes a warmth that the canyon walls do not. October light is what I want here. Spring works too, but fall has the cleaner air. Golden hour stretches longer than it should because of how the canyon holds shadow. Come with everything you need. There is no water, no fuel, no signal, no help close by. Camp if the permit allows it and you have the gear, because the night sky over Toroweap is the other photograph, the one I keep meaning to make properly and have not yet. The Milky Way comes up over the canyon and there is nothing manmade in any direction. That is rarer every year.

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