Walnut Canyon National Monument

Author's Comments

The first time I walked the Island Trail I stopped counting steps somewhere around a hundred and let the canyon do its work instead. It is not a long descent. It is a steep one, and the geology shifts as you drop, the limestone going from gray on the rim to something warmer and more banded as you reach the level where the Sinagua chose to live nearly a thousand years ago. The alcoves are the photograph, of course. But they are difficult in the way that all north-facing rock is difficult. The light does not arrive directly. It bounces, fills, suggests. Morning is the only honest time to shoot here, when the sun has cleared the opposite rim and the indirect light reaches into the dwellings without flattening them. By eleven the contrast has gone harsh and the rooms read as black holes in pale stone. Before nine they hold depth. I think the mistake most people make at Walnut Canyon is treating it as a ruins site rather than a canyon site. The dwellings are extraordinary. But the wider photograph, the one that holds the ponderosas climbing both walls and the curve of the gorge bending out of frame, is where the monument actually lives. Stand on the rim trail in late September when the light has cooled and the air is thin and clear. The canyon goes blue in the shadows and gold along the upper edges, and you can see how a people might have looked at this place eight hundred years ago and decided to stay. Bring a longer lens for the alcoves. Bring something wider for everything else.

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