Keys View

Author's Comments

Keys View is a strange overlook because what you are actually looking at is geology. The San Andreas runs along the floor of the Coachella Valley below you like a seam, and once you know where to look you cannot stop seeing it. The valley spreads out, the Salton Sea glints in the distance, and on the rare day when the air is genuinely clear you can see all the way to Mexico. Most days you cannot. The smog from Los Angeles drifts east and settles into the basin and the horizon turns soft and brown, and you have to decide whether to make the photograph anyway or wait for a better day. Winter is the better day. After a storm clears, when the wind has scrubbed the valley and the San Jacintos still have snow on them, this overlook earns its reputation. I prefer it in the half hour before sunset, when the low light starts to find the ridges below and the desert floor goes from beige to something closer to amber. The lot fills early so you need to commit. The wind at five thousand feet does not negotiate, and a light tripod will not survive it. This is a wide lens place, but I have made my favorite frame here with a longer lens, picking out a single ridge in the middle distance where the fault line catches a sliver of side light. The panoramic shot is the one everyone takes. The compressed shot, pulled out of the larger view, is the one I keep.

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