Monument Valley Dark Sky Area

Author's Comments

There is a particular hour at Monument Valley that does not appear on any itinerary. It is the window after astronomical twilight ends and before the moon, if there is one, has any say in the matter. New moon, late spring through early fall, the sky over the Navajo Nation goes as dark as anywhere I have stood in the lower forty-eight. The buttes do not so much disappear as become negative space - silhouettes cut from a sky that is genuinely full of stars. The tribal park itself closes at sunset, which sounds like a problem and is actually a gift. It forces you to shoot from The View Hotel terrace or from the campground just outside the park boundary, and both of those positions give you the Mittens at a distance that flatters them. The buttes read smaller, the sky reads larger, and the Milky Way in June and July arches directly over the formations in a way that feels almost too perfect to be real. I have made the photograph and I still do not quite believe the geometry of it. A few things I have learned. Get there before full dark and find your composition while you can still see the horizon. Foreground is the whole game here - the silhouette has to anchor the frame or the stars become wallpaper. Bring more layers than the desert daytime suggests. The temperature drops hard after midnight, even in August, and a long exposure session is a stationary one. This is not a place you photograph quickly. It is a place you sit with, in the dark, and let the sky do its slow work above the stone.

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