Crown Point Vista House

Author's Comments

The building itself is the obvious subject, and on a clear evening with the gorge stretched east in both directions it photographs almost too easily. The wide shot from the road below, with Vista House perched on its basalt point and the river bending away behind it, is the postcard. Make it once and move on. What I keep returning for is the light from inside. Late afternoon in September, when the sun is dropping toward the western end of the gorge, the windows of the rotunda throw shapes across the marble floor that change minute by minute. The interior is small and the geometry is strange and beautiful, and most visitors give it about three minutes before walking back outside. If you stay, the building rewards you. The brass, the green tile, the way the light comes through the upper windows and lands on the curved walls. Then go back out and let the gorge do its work. Sunset from Crown Point is genuinely panoramic in a way that few overlooks in the Northwest deliver, and the wind will test whatever tripod you brought. I have lost a lens cap to that wind. Plan accordingly. The crowd thins about twenty minutes after the sun is gone, and that blue hour window, when the building lights come on and the sky still holds color over the river, is the photograph most people drive away too early to make.

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