The Bear at Cottonwood

In September of 2014, on a service spur about a mile and a half east of the Cottonwood summit — the same spur, as it turns out, that produced the Yale plate nine years later — a black bear walked into my composition, stopped, looked directly at the lens, and walked out.

I made the photograph. The exposure was good. The bear is sharp, the light is on his face, and you can see his breath. I do not show the photograph to anyone, and I do not intend to publish it. The bear was wild, the place is the kind of place a bear can still be wild in, and the photograph would, if I published it, make that place slightly less wild.

There is, I think, a small ethics to landscape work that is rarely discussed: the photograph is not always the right outcome. I have a drawer of these decisions. The drawer is one of the most important parts of my work.