Shi Shi Beach

Author's Comments

The walk in is part of the photograph, even if it never appears in the frame. Four miles through Sitka spruce and mud that does not so much coat your boots as become them, and then the trail spills you onto a beach that runs longer than your eye can follow it. Shi Shi is at the far end. Point of the Arches is at the far end of that. I have come here twice, once in late August and once in early October, and both times I underestimated how much time the arches would take from me. They are not a single subject. They are a complex of stacks and pinnacles that rearrange themselves as you walk south along the beach, opening and closing against each other, framing sky and then water and then nothing at all. The light at golden hour comes in low from the west and rakes across the formations from the side, and for about forty minutes the rock goes from grey to amber to something I do not have a word for. Time the tide. A low tide at sunset is the photograph everyone wants and almost no one gets, because it requires the calendar and the sky to agree. When they do, the tidepools at the base of the arches mirror the color above them and the whole scene doubles itself. When they do not, you make the photograph that is available, and it is still better than most beaches will give you in a lifetime. Camp if you can. The walk back in the dark is not a walk you want to make twice in one day, and the morning light here is its own argument.

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