Rift Valley, From the Escarpment

Great Rift Valley, Kenya · landscape

A wide view across the Great Rift Valley from a high escarpment, a single dark volcanic cone in the foreground falling away into pale haze.

The Great Rift Valley is the kind of landscape that doesn't quite fit inside a photograph. It runs for six thousand kilometres from the Bekaa in Lebanon down to Mozambique, and the Kenyan stretch of it — visible from the escarpment road that climbs out of Nairobi toward Naivasha — is one of the great geological views on the planet. The valley floor sits about a kilometre below where you stand, and the haze does most of the work of describing the distance.

This was that view, looking south-west on a clear morning. The volcanic cone in the foreground is one of several small extrusions along the rift's eastern wall, its shadow falling left across the green floor. Behind it, the land flattens, then rises into a far ridge, then dissolves into pale blue haze. The sky above is the deep saturated colour you get at altitude, with the air thinner than it should be. I framed wide, with the cone at the left and most of the picture given to the floor of the valley. Some landscapes ask for a long telephoto. Others, like this one, ask you to stand back.

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