Ken Lockwood Gorge

Ken Lockwood Gorge doesn’t announce itself. The South Branch of the Raritan just slides along, brown-gold and clear by turns, over a streambed of granite boulders that look like they’ve been there since before anyone thought to name the place. That’s the thing about this stretch of river in Annandale: it has a stillness that makes you forget you drove an hour through traffic to get here.

Ken Lockwood Gorge · Monday 25 May 2015
Nikon D5100 · ISO 100 · 4.0 sec
18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6 · 18 mm · f/11

What struck me most, walking the path that day, was how much the river changes its mood within a few hundred metres. In one bend, the water moves fast over a shelf of rock, breaking into white foam and long, blurred ribbons when you slow your shutter down. A little further on, it pools into something glassy and still, deep enough to hide whatever’s living underneath, shallow enough at the edges to see every pebble. I caught a fly fisherman standing thigh-deep in one of these pools, working the water with the kind of patience that makes you wonder what he knows about the river that I don’t.

Pickerel Frog (Lithobates palustris) at Ken Lockwood Gorge · Monday 25 May 2015
Nikon D5100 · ISO 100 · 1/80 sec
18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6 · 55 mm · f/8.0

The forest does its own quiet work alongside the water. Beech and oak lean in from both banks, and ferns crowd the slopes wherever the light gets through. I found a leopard frog tucked against a rock, half-hidden under a dead leaf, doing its best impression of the leaf litter around it. It didn’t move while I photographed it, which either means frogs are braver than I assumed or it simply hadn’t worked out I was there.

Ken Lockwood Gorge · Monday 25 May 2015
Nikon D5100 · ISO 100 · 1/200 sec
18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6 · 20 mm · f/3.8

Further along, a side stream cuts under an old stone footbridge, arched and a little crumbling, the kind of structure that looks older than it probably is. Moss covers most of the boulders around it, and the water drops over them in small, steady steps rather than anything dramatic. It’s the sort of spot that doesn’t photograph as well as it feels to stand in.

Ken Lockwood Gorge · Monday 25 May 2015
Nikon D5100 · ISO 100 · 1/250 sec
18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6 · 18 mm · f/8.0
What I keep coming back to is the contrast between the wet and the dry. Some sections of the gorge floor were bone dry that day, all loose stone and fallen branches, while metres away the river kept moving as if nothing had changed in decades. I’m not sure whether that dry channel is seasonal or the result of a shift in the riverbed, but it gave the place a slightly unfinished, in-progress feel, like the gorge was still deciding where exactly it wanted the water to go.

Ken Lockwood Gorge · Monday 25 May 2015
Nikon D5100 · ISO 400 · 1/60 sec
18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6 · 28 mm · f/8.0

None of this is wilderness in any serious sense. The path is well-trodden, the car park was full, and somewhere behind every tree line there’s a road. But the gorge holds onto something that feels older than the traffic and the picnickers. Long exposures helped me catch a little of that: the blur of moving water against still rock, time passing in two different speeds at once. I came away with more photographs than I expected to use, which is usually a sign I should have just put the camera down and looked for a while longer.

Ken Lockwood Gorge · Monday 25 May 2015
Nikon D5100 · ISO 100 · 1/60 sec
18-55 mm f/3.5-5.6 · 22 mm · f/6.3