Spider Rock Overlook

Author's Comments

The first time I stood at the edge of Spider Rock Overlook, I did not lift my camera for almost twenty minutes. The spire rises eight hundred feet from the canyon floor, and the scale does not register at first - you have to let your eye travel down the walls and back up the column before the geometry settles. Then it lands, and the place changes you a little. Late afternoon is when this overlook earns its reputation. The South Rim runs roughly east to west, and by three or four in October the light comes in low across the canyon and rakes the western face of the spire while the eastern face falls into deep shadow. That contrast is the photograph. Spider Rock against a flat mid-day sky is just a tall rock. Spider Rock at four in the afternoon in autumn, with the shadow climbing the column and the canyon floor going copper below, is something else entirely. I try to remember, when I am there, that this is Spider Woman's home. The Diné have woven that knowledge into the place for longer than any of us have been making pictures of it. I keep my voice down. I do not fly drones here, and the Park Service asks the same. There is a way to photograph a sacred place that acknowledges what it is, and it usually involves more waiting and fewer frames. Bring a longer lens than feels necessary. The spire is farther away than it looks, and the detail in the sandstone, the horizontal banding, the way the top catches light minutes after the base has gone dark, all of it rewards reach.

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