Oh, how envious must the strata of the Grand Canyon be just now... They've waited all night to bask in the glow of sunlight, to show off the crimsons of oxidized iron, the subtle greens of exposed copper, the pastel hues of limestone layers... Yet, at the moment of sunrise, as the first rays of the Sun reach a shelf here and there that is fortuitously facing east, the landscape is already aglow with the molten gold of October aspens. Their tale is short, their colors less than fifteen minutes of fame in the geologic timeline of the canyon, but so is ours, and here we are admiring both the ancient and the new...
The Sun kisses the horizon, and then quickly departs that embrace to climb the sky. Shadows shorten, golden light fades, morning arrives. In that brief instant between dawn and day, when the waking land is parched for light, it drinks its fill of scarlet and gold, so much so that it begins to glow, briefly, like a second sun is about to rise from its bosom. It is too cold and too early yet for the trickles of snowmelt that will patiently reshape the landscape, too early for the rush of humanity that will eagerly erode the trails, too early for all but the stillness of dawn... Photographed March 2022.
The yellows, golds, and ambers of aspen
