Desert View Watchtower

Author's Comments

The drive out from the village is the part most people underestimate. Twenty-five miles of Desert View Drive, and by the time you arrive at the eastern end of the South Rim the canyon has changed character entirely. It opens. The Colorado bends into view. The Painted Desert begins to assert itself in the distance, a different kind of country altogether. The tower itself is the reason you came, and Mary Colter knew exactly what she was doing in 1932. It rises out of the rim like it has always been there, stone on stone, and at golden hour in late October the western face goes the color of old terracotta. I have made the obvious wide shot of the tower against the canyon many times and I still recommend it. But the photograph I keep returning for is interior. Morning light coming through the small windows, falling across Fred Kabotie's murals, the painted figures catching sun in a way that feels almost devotional. You have to be there early. By ten the room fills, and the light is wrong by then anyway. Outside, the rim wraps around the base of the tower and gives you angles that most rim viewpoints do not. South, east, north, the canyon different in each direction. Winter is underrated here. The snow on the inner buttes, the lower sun, the thinner air. Fewer people make the drive in January, and the ones who do tend to be quieter. Bring a wide lens for the architecture and something longer for the Painted Desert. Both will earn their place in the bag.

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