Hawks Rest at last light, from memory – the Thorofare isn’t a place you carry much gear into.
Notes
Thirty-two miles from the nearest road
Hawks Rest sits in the Thorofare, next to the farthest point from a road anywhere in the lower forty-eight. Shortest way in is about thirty-two miles. I’ve been three times, all on horseback, which remains the correct way to handle that particular math.
The timber is the bottom third of this drawing and it’s one solid black shape – no interior, no separation between trees, just a serrated top edge. That works because it’s what you actually see at that hour. Once the sun is off the valley floor, a stand of conifers stops being individual trees and becomes one mass with a ragged silhouette. Two snags break the line on the right. Those are the only things in the lower third that are their own object.
Above that, the whole event is a few minutes long. The last light comes in almost horizontally and only reaches the rim – everything below it has already gone flat and dark. That’s why the reds are stacked in bands across the top of the ridge and nowhere else. The cloud bank sitting just under the rim is doing the other half of the work: it separates the lit rock from the black timber, and without it the two would collide and the depth would go.
Six flat colors. Three red-browns carrying the rim, one near-black for all the timber, and two pale values in the sky holding the air. The greyed-lavender sky is deliberately dull – a prettier one would have made this picturesque, and the place isn’t. It’s just far away.
