Blackrock Summit

Author's Comments

Most overlooks in Shenandoah give you a view. Blackrock gives you a surface to stand on that feels genuinely foreign, like the mountain shed its skin and left only the bones. The talus field runs in every direction from the summit - grey quartzite broken into angular slabs, tilted and stacked and going nowhere in particular. No trees. No softness. Just rock and sky and whatever the valley is doing below. I have been to a lot of places in this region that people call otherworldly, and most of them are not. This one earns the word. Come in winter if you can. Snow settles into the gaps between the boulders and traces the geometry in a way that summer simply cannot offer. The grey of the quartzite against white field and blue sky at sunrise is a composition that requires almost no effort to find. You just have to be there. The mile from Blackrock Gap is easy and short, which means the early alarm is not much of a sacrifice. Sunrise light arrives low and raking across the talus, and for about twenty minutes the angular shadows between the boulders are as interesting as anything in the middle distance. That is the foreground. Do not ignore it in favor of the valley. The photographic challenge here is the monochrome problem - rock on rock, grey on grey - but early light solves most of it. The warm tones at first sun turn quartzite the color of old honey, briefly, before the morning goes white and flat.

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