Dinosaur Tracks at Moenave

Author's Comments

You pull off Route 160 and at first you are not sure you have arrived. There is a hand painted sign, a few tables of jewelry under shade cloth, and a stretch of pale sandstone that looks like nothing in particular. Then someone walks out to meet you, and within five minutes you are looking at a footprint pressed into rock a hundred and ninety million years ago, and the ground rearranges itself under you. The tracks are real. Three toed, deep, unmistakable once you know what you are seeing. A guide will pour water from a plastic bottle into the depression and the shape leaps forward - shadow finds the edges, the toe pads resolve, the whole impression becomes suddenly and almost unbearably specific. That is the photograph. A wet track in low morning light, the water pooling in a shape that something with a body and a hunger pressed into wet sand before this was a desert, before any of this was anything. I prefer late winter or early spring here. The light is low for longer in the morning, the sandstone is cool, and the wind has not yet started to move the dust around. Bring a wide lens for the slab in its landscape and something closer for the tracks themselves. Tip your guide. Tip them well. The site is on Navajo land and the people who walk you across it are the reason you will leave understanding what you saw. It is not a polished destination. That is the point. You come here for the strangeness of standing in a footprint, and for the long quiet drive afterward, when you keep thinking about it.

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