Anasazi Heritage Center

Author's Comments

The museum holds three million artifacts and most visitors come for those. I came for the hill behind the building. There is a short trail that climbs to the Dominguez and Escalante Pueblos, and from up there the landscape opens in a way the parking lot does not prepare you for. McPhee Reservoir sits below to the north, the mesas roll out in every direction, and the pueblo walls themselves, twelve centuries old and patient, sit in the foreground of all of it. I prefer this place in the first hour after the museum opens, in late September when the rabbitbrush is still yellow and the air has gone clear. The light is low enough then to find the texture in the stonework, which is the real subject if you let it be. A wide frame works for the view across the reservoir. A longer lens earns its keep on the walls themselves, where the courses of stone hold shadow in a way that midday flattens completely. This is not a dramatic site. It does not announce itself the way the cliff dwellings to the south do. But there is a quality to standing on that hilltop in the morning, with almost no one else around and the mesas going blue toward the horizon, that I find myself thinking about long after I have driven away. Bring time. Walk the loop slowly. The photograph is not at any one spot. It accumulates.

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