Weeping Souls
Photo Location: Northern California
Most waterfalls fall. Mossbrae weeps...There is no single cliff edge, no dramatic plunge, no point where the water tips over a precipice and drops. Instead, the entire face of the canyon wall along the upper Sacramento River seeps — hundreds of individual streams emerging simultaneously from the porous volcanic rock, born from snowmelt that has spent months filtering down through Mount Shasta's geology before finding its way through every crack and seam in the cliff and releasing into open air. The water doesn't arrive from above. It arrives from within the rock itself.
I made this image standing at the edge of the Sacramento River where it runs alongside the falls, the canyon walls enclosing the scene and the light arriving filtered and diffused through the vegetation that grows wherever the weeping rock gives it moisture to survive. The sound here is unlike any other waterfall I have stood in front of — not a single roar but a thousand simultaneous whispers, each individual stream finding its own path down the face of the cliff and joining the river below on its own terms. The collective effect is something between silence and sound that is difficult to describe accurately and impossible to forget once you have heard it.
Mossbrae Falls is one of those places that photographers find themselves unable to explain to people who haven't been there. The photographs don't fully capture it. The title comes closer than the image. A rock face weeping water into one of California's great rivers, in a volcanic canyon where the line between geology and something more elemental has always been thin.
TruLife acrylic-mounted limited edition of 100, signed by me with Certificate of Authenticity. Free US shipping.
Image copyright © Jongas Fine Art Photography.
