Horseshoe Bend is horseshoe-shaped turn in the Colorado River near the town of Page in Arizona. The river originates in the Rocky Mountains and feeds Lake Mead before crossing into Mexico and finally emptying into the Gulf of California.

Over the millions of years that the river has been flowing, it has dramatically carved away the rock, and provided this convenient, stunning, and somewhat frightening viewpoint.

To give the photo a sense of scale, the drop from the viewpoint to the river is claimed to be 1,000 feet. By comparison, the tallest building in Vancouver is 659 feet tall. The small white speck that can be seen on the river at the bottom of the photo is a boat (there’s also a second boat at about the 2:00 position if you imagine the loop as a clock).

This was an extremely hot and dry day, at 41°C or 106°F. There are no guard rails at the viewpoint, just the cliff edge. In order to get this photo, I had to mount the camera to my tripod, lie down on the extremely hot rock, crawl to the edge of the cliff, and hold the tripod out over the abyss with one hand, while pressing my remote trigger with the other.