ZNP Waterfall-5154c-bw-med.jpg

Introduction to this Gallery: Zion Canyon is a land of harsh contrasts and stark beauty. Deep in the canyon and along its tributaries, where there is water, there is lush growth and a plethora of life. Rising out of the canyon are sheer sandstone cliffs, rising hundreds, sometimes over a thousand feet above the canyon floor. Side canyons lead into a wilderness of high desert, where water is scarce. Most of the year the Virgin River runs placidly along the canyon bottom, fed from a few, small streams that disappear with the coming of summer. What water exists outside the Virgin is mostly a few small seeps and drips by August. However, when the rains do come, they create a wondrous and ephemeral spectacle that is a treat to experience. The slick rock of the high country above the canyon sheds the rain water and snowmelt in a single, precipitous spasm. Every crack in the rock becomes the spout of a waterfall, and the canyon feels more like Kauai than the high desert of the Colorado Plateau. Such events are relatively rare, and always short-lived. We had been hoping for more than a decade to make it to Zion in the rain, and our holiday this past February happily coincided with a winter storm, sometimes to be measured in minutes rather than hours. The images in this gallery are the product of an amazing weekend spent tromping through the rain with camera tucked inside my shell, stopping at each turn in the trail to gaze in wonderment at the next amazing waterfall, and trying to figure out how to capture it in some meaningful fashion between futile swipes at the lens with an increasingly wet cloth. From a technical standpoint, all of these images posed the challenge of a very cloudy, misty day, with flat light and very low contrast. All were captured in raw format, and translated to DNG before processing in Lightroom 5. I've done my best to render colors and textures true to what I know them to be, but some (those who have not experienced Zion in person) may find them over-saturated. Your thoughts and comments on tools and techniques for these conditions are respectfully requested, and always sincerely appreciated. I hope you enjoy viewing these images as much as I enjoyed making them. Happy trails, David.

Great scene, nicely composed.