Shift Change

We were driving up toward Tony Grove, which had been one of our regular summer escapes in the years we lived in Logan, and I pulled over because of what was going on across the canyon. The aspens on that hillside had gone into their turn at completely different rates, so within a single slope there were greens that hadn’t started, yellows halfway along, and oranges and reds that were already finished — all of it visible at once. It happens some years and you have to be driving past on the day it does.

I put the long lens on and shot it from where the car was parked, which was the only real option given the ground between us. At 160mm the hillside flattens into a field of colour with more in common with woven cloth than with a landscape, and the thing that holds it together is the bare aspen trunks running up through the middle of it. They’re no thicker than toothpicks at that distance, and they’re the only clue in the frame that those trees are fifty or sixty feet tall, since there’s no ground and no sky to measure them against.

I made a note of the spot and watched it in the autumns after that one.