Artist Bluff

Author's Comments

The trail is short and the climb is steep enough to remind you that you are doing something. Half a mile, thirty minutes if you take your time, and then the trees thin and the ledge opens and Franconia Notch is laid out below you like a relief map. Echo Lake sits directly beneath, and Cannon rises across the notch, and Lafayette beyond that holds the eastern wall. The painters of the nineteenth century came here for a reason. The composition is already made. You are simply choosing what hour to receive it. I prefer the bluff in late September, just before the ridges turn fully. The color is starting in the lower elevations and the higher slopes are still holding green, which gives the notch a layered quality that pure peak foliage flattens. Golden hour is the obvious answer and the right one. The light comes in low from the west and rakes across Cannon's face, and the lake below goes from blue to something warmer and stranger. Shadow fills the notch before the ledges go dark, and for ten or fifteen minutes the depth of the place is fully visible. Come early if you want the ledge to yourself. By mid-morning in fall there will be people, and the ledge is not large. Sunrise is quieter than sunset and the light, while colder, falls on the eastern faces in a way the evening cannot reach. A wide lens is the right choice here. The view asks for it.

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