Horseshoe Bend in Arizona- Not for Timid Photographers
This iconic landscape appears in every full color calendar of the American Southwest. Capturing your own photo requires some nerve.
The turnoff for Horseshoe Bend is just three miles south of Lake Powell Boulevard in Page, Arizona on US 89. There is a puny, inadequate parking lot a few hundred feet off the road, so on this busy day, dozens of us had to park along the side of the highway.
The turnoff for Horseshoe Bend is just three miles south of Lake Powell Boulevard in Page, Arizona on US 89. There is a puny, inadequate parking lot a few hundred feet off the road, so on this busy day, dozens of us had to park along the side of the highway.
The hike to the overlook is ¾ of mile, starting with a moderately steep quarter mile climb along a sandy, windswept path, followed by a similarly steep descent of a half mile to the canyon edge. Before we started, a weathered interpretive sign at the trailhead gave the usual warnings about heat, safety, and weather. At the bottom of the sign, it was amended with an adhesive sticker that addressed one of the newer artifacts that inhabit our modern world: “NO DRONES ALLOWED.”
The walk took us exactly 12 minutes but would have been much longer had we elected to help a family that was pushing an older gentleman in a wheelchair up the hill. We wanted the poor guy to experience the view as much as his family, but in the thick sand, it was a lost cause, and would have been flat-out dangerous on the downhill side. So we walked on, hoping that their attempt would be self- limiting.
It was a Wednesday evening, about an hour and half before sunset, and literally hundreds of people were passing each other in both directions on the trail. We wondered why we were the only ones carrying tripods and camera equipment, only to find that the best vantage points were already taken by photographers who had beaten us to the punch.
It was a dubious logistical coup, though, because in order to capture the entire horseshoe of the river, you had to position your tripod and your feet within inches of a thousand foot drop off. These photographers were packed in close enough to lock elbows.
I was not willing to get this close — neither was my always-cautious wife — so I attached my iPhone to my six-foot monopod and held it high over the edge. With a 3-second delay on my shutter — and numerous blind tries (I couldn’t see what my phone was seeing) — I was able get most of the horseshoe of the river and its shoreline within the frame of the shot, without the need to “hang ten” with the other photographers.
This 270-degree bend of the Colorado River (called an entrenched meander, the technical term for the horseshoe shaped cut of the river) is as iconic as anything in the southwestern U.S. The best calendar photos of Horseshoe Bend are photographed at sunset around this time of year when the sun sets near dead center of the photo.
It’s the money shot, to be sure, and it attracts the kind of photographer who has read the blogs and talked up the locals, and has one opportunity to get it right. Seemingly unconcerned that an errant gust of wind, an untied shoelace, or a swarm of bees could make his future notoriety posthumous.
Earlier in the day, in a strip mall parking lot in Page, I watched a guy in a navy blue hoodie take his index finger and rub it across 18” of asphalt as if he were checking for dust. Then he took that same finger, looked at the tip for a second, and rubbed it into his ear. I told my wife about this and she said, “Oh, he’s probably mentally ill.”
Well, yeah, but what if this guy showed up at the overlook at Horseshoe Bend? Here are these photographers, lined up within an inch of their lives, standing tripod to tripod with no margin for error, all trusting the normalcy of the stranger next them. Suddenly, over the hill comes this crazy guy in the hoodie, looking for something — or someone — to touch.
The one thing that unifies every commercial or amateur photograph of Horseshoe Bend is that every photo is framed from roughly the same vantage point. The reason is that there is a scant two or three hundred feet of accessible viewing area along the undulating coves and abutments and spikes of rock that make up this amorphous edge.
While the professional photographers patiently hold their ground, the rest of the masses move along the varied edge, jumping from rock to rock, trying to find a place for the thing they like to do best: take selfies.
A selfie without Horseshoe Bend in the backround is a nonstarter. That means that entire families, down to eight and nine year olds, climb up on rock outcrops near the edge, selfie sticks extended, all to justify and glorify their visit. The twenty-somethings are the most fearless. They feel the need to test the integrity of the weathered sandstone by standing or sitting within a hair’s breadth of oblivion, then take a selfie as they lean into the abyss.
I’m no wimp when it comes to heights, but one guy had inched himself so far down on a curved block of stone that I had to turn and walk away — only to scold myself later for not switching my phone to video first.
Another young woman, who later introduced herself as a San Franciscan who drove a rental car here from Las Vegas, also found a dicey promontory on which to sit. But this time, instead of fretting for her safety, I found a spot above her, and with my monopod held high, I was able to get her and the river in the same frame. She gave perfect perspective to a scene that is usually static and human-less.
Had she not been so bold, my photo would have been like all the others that grace one page of every full color calendar ever made of the American Southwest. I showed her one of the photos, and I later texted it to her, adding, “Don’t let your mother see this until you get home.”
After the sun had set below the horizon about 7:15pm, I settled onto a sturdy ledge about ten feet from the nearest edge and heard a man’s voice say with a gringo accent, “Uno, dos, tres.” He was older, dressed in a wide hat and trendy hiking clothes, his wife by his side. When I glanced over, he was tipping a pint bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold.
It was a fitting toast, I suppose, and capped off a bizarre scene that, in one form or another, has been repeated thousands of times. And that classic photo of Horseshoe Bend on your office calendar? It only tells half the story.
