Ladder Creek Falls

Author's Comments

The falls themselves are not the spectacle here. They are a sequence rather than a single drop, a creek working its way down through a gorge so densely mossed that the rock feels almost incidental. What I love about Ladder Creek is the way the whole place reads as a single living thing. The water is part of it. The moss is part of it. The light coming down through the old growth is part of it. Come in late spring when the runoff is still strong and the green has fully arrived. Morning is the hour, before the sun reaches over the canyon walls and the gorge holds that even, shadowless light that long exposures love. I shoot tight here. The wide compositions never quite work for me at Ladder Creek - the gorge is too narrow, the trees too tall, the scale resistant to a single frame. But the details are endless. A fern bent over a small cascade. The way the water braids around a moss-covered log. The particular green of wet stone in diffused light. The loop is short, barely four tenths of a mile, and most people walk through it in fifteen minutes. I would give it an hour. Two if the light is right. The interpretive signs are worth reading once and then ignoring. This is a place to slow down inside of, not to move through.

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