Among professional photographers there are endless stories about the difficulty of shooting the Grand Canyon. The locations suggested by the trail signs and the rangers can yield decent but utterly interchangeable images from photographer to photographer. To get something truly unique and wonderful one has to get off the trail and avoid the same viewpoints used by the casual visitor. I was excited by the challenge.

I was welcomed to the canyon midmorning by a gorgeously sunny, 70 degree day. But by 3PM a light snow grew in intensity until it had become a snowstorm. Within an hour, the distant walls of the canyon had disappeared behind a curtain of white. Columns of rock appeared and then vanished in the snowstorm, an undulating scrim of white hiding and then revealing massive monoliths and cliff walls across the crevasse where I was shooting. This is the magic of shooting passive video rather than capturing stills. No amount of still shots can properly convey the magic of the scene presented that day.