Sparks Lake

Author's Comments

The wind is the problem and the wind is the answer. By ten in the morning Sparks Lake will have a chop on it and the reflection you came for will be gone, broken into the kind of texture that does not photograph as anything in particular. So you arrive in the dark. You set up while the sky over Broken Top is still that pre-dawn blue that does not have a name, and you wait for the first light to find South Sister. What makes this lake worth the early alarm is not just the mirror. It is the lava. The shoreline here is black volcanic rock, jagged and porous, and it gives you something to anchor the foreground that most alpine lakes simply do not have. A clean reflection of a mountain is a postcard. A clean reflection of a mountain with a lava shelf in the lower third of the frame is a photograph. I prefer late September. The summer crowds have moved on, the mosquitoes are gone, and the light has gone slightly gold at the edges in a way it does not in July. The water level drops by then too, exposing more of the lava and more of the small islands of grass that float in the shallows. Come with a wide lens for the full sweep of the Cascades, but bring something longer as well. There is a tighter composition here, just South Sister and her own inverted self, that I have only managed once and have been chasing ever since.

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