The Ember and the Moon
Sandstone the color of a dying coal rises against a sky just past dusk, its ridgeline still holding the last heat of the day. Low in the gap between two peaks, the moon has climbed into view — a quiet witness to rock that has been burning, slowly, for two hundred million years. Captured at Valley of Fire after a three-day pilgrimage from Yosemite through Los Angeles and into the desert beyond Las Vegas, this image is the reward for the miles: the moment the land stops being a drive-through and becomes a place that looks back at you.
Artist Statement
I drove for three days to get here — out of Yosemite's granite hush, through the sprawl of Los Angeles, and into the long dark stretch of desert past Las Vegas — with no plan beyond making camp before nightfall. I didn't come looking for this photograph. I came looking for a place to sleep.
But Valley of Fire doesn't let you sleep without paying attention first. As I finished setting up camp, the rock went from red to ember, and the moon rose into the notch between two peaks like it had been waiting for me to look up. I grabbed my camera and shot until the light was gone, half-convinced I'd already seen the best this place had to offer.
I was wrong. I woke the next morning to an entirely different mountain — the same stone, the same sky, but reassembled by the sunrise into something I hadn't photographed the night before. Nature doesn't often give you a second version of the same scene, rewritten in a different light. This time, it did.
The Ember and the Moon is what I made of that gift. It's a photograph about arrival — about how far you sometimes have to drive, and how little control you have over when the land decides to show itself.