The Expanse

The West Rim Trail was iced from low down and got worse once we were into Refrigerator Canyon. We made it as far as Walter’s Wiggles and stood looking at them — thick, layered ice banked on every switchback — tried a few steps, thought better of it, and turned around. Not today.

This frame is from before that, at the point where the trail finishes wrapping around the cliff face and is about to move into the woods of Refrigerator Canyon. It’s the last of the wide view before the walls close in on you.

I shot it in black and white in the camera rather than converting it afterward. That’s a discipline worth keeping: if the composition holds without color to carry it, the composition holds. Winter makes it easy — on an overcast day in a canyon, there isn’t much color to give up.

The camera was a Sigma dp2 Quattro, which I only owned for a short while. It had shortcomings I couldn’t work around, and it eventually went, but the Foveon sensor did something I’ve never quite gotten back from a conventional one. Look at the rock here: there’s dimensionality in it, micro contrast that keeps a scene this large from going flat, so the walls read as surfaces you could put a hand on instead of grey shapes at a distance.