"All this volume of water, confined, as it is, in a narrow channel and rushing with great velocity, is set eddying and spinning in whirlpools by projecting rocks and short curves, and the waters waltz their way through the canyon, making their own rippling, rushing, roaring music," wrote explorer John Wesley Powell in his diary on June 21, 1869. He named this canyon as he did many other landmarks and geologic features he wrote about during his 1869 river expedition.

Powell and his crew rode the Green River's rapids and whitewater in their oak boats. They began their adventure a month earlier in the Wyoming Territory and ended two months later after rafting the Grand Canyon. One hundred and fifty years later, the historic beauty of this view looks much the same in this photograph as the crew beheld during their passage.

I made this photograph from a vantage point one-half mile above the river on a trail that straddles the narrow spine of a ridge named Harper's Corner in northwestern Colorado's Dinosaur National Monument. Usually a shade of green-blue, on this day, the river runs a radiant salmon-brown following the passage of a series of storms. Pinion and juniper cover the slopes that cascade from the precipice to the riverbank. Across the Green, ancient limestone and shale cliffs merge with the blue horizon outlining Utah's 13,000-foot Uinta Mountains.

- James Baker