“Towers in the Fog”, Smith Rock State Park

Smith Rock Group, Crooked River and the distant Three Sisters shrouded in inversion fog

Oregon’s beloved Smith Rock State Park is one of the jewels of our state park system. Located near the high desert town of Terrebonne, Oregon, Smith Rock gets nearly 1,000,000 million visitors per year. Part of the skyrocketing visitor numbers can be attributed to Travel Oregon’s & wonders of Oregon campaign but most of the park’s acclaim can be credited to its natural beauty. When setting Itineraries for visiting friends, I note that Smith Rock is far different than anywhere in Oregon and has rock formations unlike anywhere on the west coast. Smith’s vertical walls are hypnotizing and its colors and textures are mesmerizing. I’ve been to Smith Rock hundreds of times in the past, and many of those times were at sunrise for the purpose of Oregon landscape photography. I’ve captured some excellent images and lots of average images but never one quite this new image, Towers in the fog!

A little background on winter in Central Oregon…. It is cold here and the days are short. We often have blue skies here in our high elevation

Smith Rock inversion fog

desert climate but occasionally we experience winter Inversion Fog.  Inversions are briefly enchanting but for me become depressing, quite quickly. They create a cold, dense, sunless micro-climate which can last for days during windless high pressure systems which heat upper levels allowing cold, moist ice fog to settle in valleys and basins.

Let me rewind a few years ago to a morning…. I was on top of Misery Ridge at Smith Rock and ran into a fellow hiker with whom i share a pleasant conversation. That gentleman frequently hiked at Smith in the morning and shared an iphone image of Smith Rock’s “Smith Rock Group” which is pictured in the fog on the left side of this description. I was enchanted but the hiker’s iphone pic and I made a mental note to try to return to Smith during inversion conditions in hopes of capturing a new fine art print similar to ” Towers in the Fog”.   Well now, please fast forward to 12/29/25. That morning, our wonderful daughter, Emma was wrapping up a holiday visit to our home in Bend and  she was flying out of the Redmond airport Early in the morning… Alarms sounded at 3:45 AM and Emma was dropped off  hours before sunrise. Debbie and I returned home and I opted to stay up and drive to Smith Rock for sunrise. We had clear starry skies in Bend but upon arrival at Smith Rock, there was a dense inversion fog shrouding the park’s iconic towers.  I flashed back to my mental note about an inversion fog landscape photograph at Smith and immediately started climbing Misery Ridge in hopes of ascending above the fog layer. I hadn’t allotted time for climbing Misery Ridge before sunrise so I hauled my gear upward as fast as my old legs would carry me, summiting in time to capture some amazing morning light. The fog conditions around the “Smith Rock Group” pictured in this new fine art landscape photograph fluctuated between dense fog completely engulfing the towers and sparse low fog decorating the towers while a dense layer continued to shroud Central Oregon to the south and west.  The light was enchanting!

There are lots of details which excite me about this new image. Foremost is its uniqueness. Being there on a foggy day when you  can get above the fog enough to see Smith Rock’s towers, Mt Bachelor, Broken Top and the Three Sisters all covered in fresh winter snow is simply a rare opportunity.  Not having a dense layer of fog in the foreground opens up the undulating line of Misery Ridge illuminated by first light and leading the viewers toward the “Smith Rock Group” and the Crooked River far below.

I’d like to share a special shout-out to the random hiker from years ago who shared their iphone pic of Smith Rock rising above a sea of fog. Without him sharing that image I may not have decided to climb Misery Ridge to capture this stunning new fine art landscape photograph.  Id also like to shout-out “Kevin”, who I ran into on one of my first stops along Misery Ridge. Kevin was a fit friendly guy who was pleasant to chat with on that cold foggy morning.