
While hiking in Arches NP Park near Balanced Rock, a thunderstorm approached. As I hoofed it back to my car, I was struck by the barren branches of this dead tree framed against the approaching storm. It made a statement about life in the desert. The storm arrived too late to deliver water that might have saved the tree. Sometimes weather makes the shot. Several years later, when I returned to this spot, the tree had turned into a pile of decaying wood and the sky was cobalt blue. As Ansel Adams once said, “You can never take the same shot twice.”