Norman Maclean wrote in his book A River Runs Through It And Other Stories:
“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
The images of the free flowing rivers of the west were vivid for me in his book and even more so in the movie Robert Redford made from it. The rivers of the west are mysterious, forbiding and beautiful all at the same time.
The once mighty Colorado (formally The Grand) no longer flows to its original termination in the gulf of Mexico. It dies short of its destination in the hot Mexican sand. However it still does have many tributaries that join from the inception in the Rocky Mountains to flow almost 1,500 miles.
The Green River is one of the last majors to combine forces in todays Canyonlands National Park just before the rush into what is now known as The Grand Canyon, but upstream before it does comes the confluence of the Yampa.
In the image …….
At the end of Steamboat Rock at Echo Park the Green River on the left converges with the Yampa River on the right. In summer it usually is a tranquil place but one has only to glance at the eroded shoreline to see the debris scattered everywhere to understand the impact of high water!
To demonstrate these qualities photographically I created a 30 second exposure using a Singh-Ray Vari-ND Trio. The filter has the ColorCombo polarizer built in and the variable light adjustment allows me to set up a desired shutter and aperture combination. In this case I wanted an aperture and focus point to hold the foreground grasses at 18 inches and still have depth of field to the cliffs in the distance. F/16 in this case and the focus about 5 feet, or the riverbank in the image. The 30 second exposure created the water movement around the fractured tree stumps and smoothed the rest. As viewed it was very nondescript. In post-processing I choose to slightly blur the grasses and tree while sharpening the detail of Steamboat Rock on the left.
The area is legendary for a lot of reasons and this, my first visit, did not dissapoint!
