Subway Station

The three of us stood around in there for a while first, just looking at it. My wife, my friend Jeff and I had walked nearly five miles up the Left Fork of North Creek to get to this — over boulders, in and out of the creek, crossing from bank to bank because there is no consistent trail once you’re in the canyon — and arriving felt like something worth marking before I started working.

Then I got the camera out and became immediately paranoid. Three small groups had been resting outside when we came through and I was certain one of them was about to walk into my frame, so I rushed around more than I’d have liked. Nobody came. We had the interior to ourselves the whole time, and I ended up in there about forty-five minutes working several views.

The formation is a run of overflow pools with water cascading down through all of it, and the walls are rounded over your head closely enough that it reads as a cave even though the top is open to the sky in a narrow strip. I spent a while trying to think about what a storm does in there, and about the forces that hollowed the rock into that shape in the first place.

What makes this frame is the glow on the curved wall, and that light comes from outside. Without the sun hitting that surface from beyond the entrance the whole scene flattens out — still an extraordinary place, but not nearly as alive. The water was every bit as green as it looks, though slightly less saturated to the eye than the frame suggests; the colour shifted considerably as the light moved.

I shot several frames looking the other way, toward the upper entrance, where the water goes much bluer. None of them worked. That view is still on my list.