Totem Pole and Yei Bi Chei

Author's Comments

The Totem Pole stands at the edge of what most visitors of Monument Valley will ever see. You cannot drive here. You cannot walk here on your own. You arrive in the back of a Navajo guide's truck after a long, slow approach across a wash that reduces the surrounding mesas to silhouettes, and when the spire finally appears it is taller and thinner than any photograph has prepared you for. Four hundred and fifty feet of sandstone holding itself up against gravity and time. The Yei Bi Chei stand beside it like a procession paused mid-step. The Navajo name them for the spirit dancers, and once you have seen the formation you cannot unsee the resemblance. Stone figures in a line, robed and watchful. I have been here twice. Both times in October, both times within the last hour of light, when the sun drops behind the formations and turns them into pure shape. This is what backlight does to sandstone in the desert at six in the evening: it strips away the orange we associate with this country and leaves you with edges. The spires go nearly black. The sky behind them goes the color of a peach split open. The shadows on the valley floor stretch out long and low and the whole composition flattens into something almost graphic. Bring a long lens. The temptation is to go wide and fit everything in, but the photograph that holds is the tighter one, where the Totem Pole and the dancers compress against each other and the sky does the rest of the work. Trust your guide on the timing. They know the light here better than you ever will.

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