Cathedral Gorge State Park, Nevada
Minas Tirith
Deep inside Cathedral Gorge, I came across a lone tower of pale clay rising more than thirty feet above the canyon floor. It was completely free-standing, improbably narrow, and brilliantly white beneath the midday sun. Against the saturated blue sky and scattered clouds, it looked less like a geological formation and more like something from Middle-earth.
The shape immediately brought Minas Tirith to mind—the great white city of The Lord of the Rings. There was something almost absurd about seeing a structure so monumental and seemingly fragile standing entirely on its own, carved by erosion and somehow still waiting for the rest of the city to appear.
I wanted the photograph to preserve that sense of scale and improbability: one solitary tower, standing against an enormous sky, as though it had survived after everything around it had disappeared.
Nikon Z 9 · Nikkor Z 14-24mm · 19mm · f/9 · 1/400 sec · ISO 64
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Frame 38 of 67
