Shaped by Stone

I photographed this solitary Utah juniper along the Broken Arch Loop Trail in Arches National Park many times. At just three miles round trip, the trail has become one of Rhonda's and my favorite ways to stretch our legs when we feel the need to get out for a while. The route begins at the Sand Dune Arch trailhead, crosses open desert to Broken Arch, continues past Tapestry Arch, loops through the campground, and finally winds back through a maze of sandstone fins. With little elevation gain and only a few sandy stretches, it is one of the park's most pleasant walks.

We've hiked this trail so many times that I've long since lost count. Along the way stands a solitary Utah juniper that has always drawn my attention. It is unusually tall and straight for a species more commonly known for twisted trunks and wind-sculpted forms. Perhaps it owes its stature to the towering sandstone fins that surround it, collecting and directing precious runoff toward its roots.

I've photographed this tree many times over the years and under every imaginable lighting condition. Yet somehow the photographs never quite matched the feeling of standing before it. Something was always missing - a sense of place, a sense of belonging among the sandstone walls that have shaped its life.

In red rock country, turning away from color is rarely an easy choice. Utah's landscape seems made for color photography: brilliant red sandstone, deep blue skies, and the muted greens of desert vegetation. As much as I love black-and-white photography, those colors are difficult to leave behind.

Yet on a spring afternoon, as the sun raked across the tree from the side, black and white felt inevitable.

Color tends to separate the elements of the scene. The foliage is green. The sandstone is red. The two exist as distinct subjects. Remove the color, however, and that separation begins to dissolve. The tree becomes inseparable from the landscape around it. The sandstone no longer serves merely as a backdrop; it becomes part of the tree's story. Together they appear shaped by the same forces of time, weather, and endurance.

Unlike the days when I worked in the darkroom, digital processing allows me to apply colored filtration after the fact. Drawing on those old black-and-white techniques, I used a modest yellow filter effect to strengthen the contrast between the sunlit foliage and the surrounding sandstone. The adjustment was subtle, but it helped reveal the relationship I had always sensed between the tree and the stone.

When I look at the finished photograph, I see more than a juniper growing beside a cliff. I see a living thing that likely took root long before I arrived and will almost certainly remain long after I am gone. The sandstone records the passage of millions of years. The tree measures time in centuries. I am merely passing through.

Perhaps that is one of the lessons of the desert. Beneath all the colors that first capture our attention, life often comes down to simpler things: persistence and impermanence, presence and absence, beginnings and endings.

After 40 years of wandering the red rock deserts of the Southwest it's clear to me that, in many ways, life is black and white.