White House Ruin Trail

Author's Comments

The trail begins at the rim and almost immediately commits you to the canyon. Six hundred feet down through switchbacks cut into red sandstone, then a short tunnel through the rock, and you are on the floor of Canyon de Chelly with the walls rising around you in that particular shade of oxidized rust that only happens here. The ruin itself is set back into an alcove across the wash, and you cannot approach it. You stand at a respectful distance and you look. Morning is the hour. Spring or fall, before the sun has cleared the eastern rim, the alcove is still in shadow and the canyon wall above it catches the first warm light. There is a moment, maybe twenty minutes long, when the contrast is exactly right - the lower dwelling glowing softly in reflected light, the streaked desert varnish above going copper, the cottonwoods on the canyon floor still cool and green. Miss it by an hour and the whole scene flattens into midday glare. This is the only trail in Canyon de Chelly you can walk without a Navajo guide, and I think that fact deserves to be carried with you down the switchbacks. The canyon is lived in. The fields you pass on the floor belong to families. The ruin is not a curiosity but a presence, and the photograph you make should know the difference. I tend to shoot wider than feels natural here, letting the alcove sit small inside the scale of the wall, because that is closer to the truth of the place than any tight detail of the masonry could be. Carry water. Climb back up slowly. The canyon does not reward hurry.

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