Painted Desert Views at Ward Terrace

Author's Comments

The first time I drove this stretch of 89 I almost did not stop. It was midday in June, the light was flat and unkind, and the desert looked like something washed out in an old photograph. I have learned since then that Ward Terrace asks for different conditions, and when you give them to it, the place does something I have not quite seen anywhere else in Arizona. Come in late October, or better, late February, the day after rain. The Chinle Formation is essentially a long horizontal record of ancient mud, and when that mud is dry it goes pale and chalky and surrenders most of its color to the sun. Wet it down, even just overnight, and the reds turn to oxblood, the purples deepen toward bruise, the grays go almost blue. The bands separate themselves. The whole terrace reads like a topographic map rendered in pigment. Golden hour is the obvious answer and it is the right one, but I would push for the half hour before sunset rather than the half hour after sunrise. The light comes in from the west at that hour and rakes across the badlands at an angle that lifts every ridge and gully. Shadows do most of the work. The pullouts along the highway are unceremonious, just gravel shoulders really, but a few of them open onto views that run uninterrupted for what feels like fifty miles. Bring a wide lens. Bring a longer one too. The wide shot is the one you came for, but the photograph that surprised me was made at two hundred millimeters, compressing three distant ridges into a single striped wall.

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