The day we walked up the road in Lamb’s Canyon, the sun was warm and bright, and everything looked as if it had been done over by Mother Nature’s spring cleaning — all the branches were bare on the aspen and scrub oak. The snow was slowly drawing back the covers it had thrown over the rocks and the ridgelines from their winter sleep. It’s not spring up there just yet, but it’s just around the next turn in the road. And in the meantime, the snow is melting into pure, cold water. From here, it flows into Parley’s Canyon, then Mountain Dell Reservoir, and from there it either becomes drinking water for the Salt Lake Valley, or it flows down into the Jordan and eventually might make it as far as the Great Salt Lake, where it doesn’t do anyone much good except the companies that run lake water into huge evaporation basins for recovering salt and other minerals.

But for now, it’s clean and beautiful and fresh and newly made. It’s a shame it has to go from flowing naturally, in classic “babbling brook” fashion, into dark pipes and covered runoff channels. Just so that someone might drink it once it’s been chemically treated, or that it might water some plants — or more likely run down and be lost in polluted channels or algae-covered salt pans.

I might end up printing and framing this image – most of the others from that day are nice, but chaotic with trees and roots and rocks all crowding into the image, but this one is simple and clean.