Unaweep-Tabeguache Scenic Byway - Unaweep Canyon

Author's Comments

The first time I drove Highway 141 south out of Grand Junction, I did not know what I was looking at. I knew the walls were tall and the road was empty and the light in the late afternoon was doing something I wanted to photograph. What I did not know was that I was driving along a divide where two creeks part ways and run in opposite directions, which is the kind of geological fact that sounds invented until you stand at the high point at 7,048 feet and feel the country tilting away from you in both directions. The walls are old in a way that is hard to hold in your head. Precambrian granite at the base, almost two billion years of it, and then Wingate sandstone laid across the top like a much younger hat. Afternoon light is what makes this readable. The granite goes warm and the sandstone goes red and the seam between them becomes the photograph. I tend to work from the pulloffs near the divide, where the cliffs are tallest and the shadows fall longest into the canyon floor. This is not a place that crowds. I have driven the byway on a Saturday in October and passed maybe four cars in two hours. That solitude is part of what the canyon offers, and it changes how you photograph it. There is no rush. You can wait for the light to do what it is going to do. Bring a wide lens for the scale and a longer one for the detail in the rock face, where the granite weathers in ways that reward closer attention than most drivers give it.

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