As a lover of geology, when I first arrived in the Cullasaja River Gorge for my two-month artist residency at The Bascom Center for Visual Arts, I wanted to know what the rock was. In that region of the Blue Ridge Mountains, on the Highlands Plateau, it’s gneiss, a metamorphic rock formed during the paleozoic. In the early spring, I left the car at the entrance to the campground at Van Hook Glade—it was still gated then—and made my way through a thicket of rhododendron to the river. There I found this rock face—it resembles a sleeping lizard. I knew I had to photograph it—and I knew, too, that the shadows falling over it would change rapidly. The time to return with the camera would be in the late afternoon. I returned the next afternoon and had a hell of a time getting the 4x5 and the tripod through that thicket, and I used my 360mm Schneider Tele-Xenar lens to reach across an expanse of water to properly frame it. Best of all, there was a “beard” of ice hung from its chin. sometimes you get lucky. This was one of the prints I made large, 11x14, for my show at The Bascom’s Joel Gallery.