Desert View Watchtower

Author's Comments

The tower is the photograph everyone makes first, and I made it too. Stone stacked seventy feet against the eastern sky, Mary Colter's quiet act of homage, the silhouette that has anchored a thousand postcards. It is a worthy frame. But the photograph I keep returning for is interior, not exterior, and it requires being inside the tower in the first hour after it opens. Kabotie's murals catch morning light in a way that does not happen later in the day. The small windows are placed deliberately, and at the right hour they throw shafts across the painted walls that bring the figures forward out of the stone. I shoot these with a wider lens than feels reasonable, low to the floor, letting the ceiling pull upward into the frame. It is a different kind of landscape photograph. The canyon is outside, but the canyon is also somehow in here. Then back out to the rim. The eastern end of the South Rim is where the Colorado actually shows itself, a bend of river far below catching whatever light is left, and beyond it the Painted Desert begins to do its long slow work in pinks and grays. Late afternoon in November is when I have made my strongest pictures here. The summer haze has cleared. The shadows inside the canyon get articulate. The tower itself, photographed from a hundred yards west with the desert as backdrop, finally reads at the scale Colter intended. Come early for the interior. Stay late for the rim. The drive from the village is twenty-five miles and worth every one of them.

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