Agathla Peak

Author's Comments

You see it before you understand what you are seeing. Driving north on 163 from Kayenta, Agathla rises out of the desert like something the earth pushed up and forgot to soften - black, jagged, almost vertical against the red ground. It is the spine of a volcano that erosion stripped down to its hardest core, and it has been standing there longer than any human story attached to it. The Navajo consider it sacred. Stand near it for ten minutes and you will understand why. The photograph everyone takes is the one from the highway pullouts, with the peak centered and the road leading toward it. That image is real and worth making. But the late light is what changes this place. In the last forty minutes before sunset, the dark basalt picks up a warmth it does not have at midday - not red, exactly, but a deeper black with red inside it - and the surrounding desert goes the color of a struck match. Winter afternoons are best. The sun sits lower, the shadows on the peak's faces get longer, and the contrast between the cold dark stone and the warm desert floor reaches something close to its full potential. I do not climb it. No one should. The respect this peak commands is part of what makes the photograph honest. Stay at the pullouts, work the foreground, wait for a cloud to do something interesting behind the summit. A long lens compresses the peak against the distant mesas and is worth carrying. A wide lens with a low, simple foreground of sage and dirt is the other photograph. Both work. Neither captures it fully.

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