Tonto National Monument

Author's Comments

I almost did not write about this one. Tonto sits an hour and a half from Phoenix on a road that does not particularly want you to find it, and the lower dwelling is a half-mile walk that climbs gently through saguaro and palo verde to a stone alcove that has been holding its shape for seven hundred years. You can see Roosevelt Lake below, blue and improbable. You can see the desert opening out in every direction. The crowds, when there are crowds, are small. Morning is the only honest time to be here. The dwelling faces roughly south and west, and in the first hour after the gate opens the light reaches inside the alcove and finds the interior walls, the soot still on the ceiling, the small windows looking out toward the lake. By midday the light flattens and the magic is gone. By afternoon the alcove is in shadow and the photograph you wanted is no longer available. I shoot this place two ways. The wide frame is the obvious one - dwelling tucked into cliff, saguaro in the foreground, the Sierra Anchas behind. It works. But the photograph I keep returning for is tighter, made from inside the structure looking out, where the doorway becomes a frame and the desert beyond goes soft in the morning haze. The Salado who built this chose the view deliberately. Standing in their rooms at sunrise, you understand why. Come in February or March, when the brittlebush is starting to bloom yellow at the base of the trail. Come at opening. Bring a lens that can handle both the wide and the intimate. This is a place that gives more than it promises.

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