Virgin in the Storm

Late January in Zion, you can have the park. We lived in St. George then and came often enough to learn when nobody else would — and if the weather was bad, better still. Some days we’d barely see another person.

This was the same day as The Expanse. The ice on the West Rim Trail had turned us back at Walter’s Wiggles, so we drove instead, up to the Temple of Sinawava and back. Melt was coming off the top of the canyon walls in places and throwing temporary waterfalls down the rock. I shot several of those, but none of them turned into anything.

What did work was a bend in the river I’d marked on the way in, somewhere between the Weeping Rock stop and the Grotto. Light snow falling, more of it stacking up behind the rim, and the cloud starting to take the top off the cliff.

Shot in black and white in the camera, like everything else I made with that Sigma. It’s a useful discipline and in a canyon in January it costs you nothing — there isn’t much colour out there to give up.