Tamolitch Blue Pool

Author's Comments

The first time I saw the pool I did not entirely trust my eyes. Photographs do not lie about Tamolitch, exactly, but they do not prepare you either. The blue is so saturated that it reads as wrong, as if someone had spilled pigment into the basin overnight, and the longer you sit with it the stranger it becomes. The hike in is gentle and mostly flat, a slow walk through Douglas fir and moss along the McKenzie. You hear the river to your right for most of it. And then, near the end, the river simply stops. The bed goes dry. You realize the water has gone underground somewhere upstream and is moving beneath your feet through old lava, and when you reach the pool you are looking at the place where it surfaces again, perfectly clear and perfectly cold and that impossible color. Afternoon is when the canyon catches enough light to send it down to the water. Earlier than that and the pool sits in shadow and the blue goes flat. Late summer and early fall are best - the water level drops, the clarity sharpens, and the alders along the rim begin to turn. I have made the wide shot from the cliff edge and I have made the closer detail of submerged logs forty feet down looking like they are floating in air, and the second photograph is the one I keep. This is not a secret place. People will be there. But it holds something that resists being fully captured, and I think that is part of why I keep going back. The pool is older than the trail to it, and quieter than the people who arrive, and it does not particularly care whether you get the photograph.

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