Tonto National Monument

Author's Comments

The trail up to the Lower Cliff Dwelling is short, and that brevity is part of why I love this place. Half a mile of switchbacks through saguaro and ocotillo and you arrive at a 700-year-old room block tucked into a natural alcove, looking out across Roosevelt Lake toward the Mazatzals. The structure is the obvious subject. But the photograph I am usually after is the relationship between the dwelling and the desert it watches over, and that requires a wider lens than instinct suggests. Morning is the only answer. The alcove faces roughly south and west, which means the interior walls catch direct light for a narrow window after sunrise, and inside that window the masonry goes warm and the shadows in the doorways turn into something you can read. Come too late and the light flattens. Come in summer and you will not want to be on the trail at all. I prefer late February or early March, when the brittlebush is starting to bloom yellow at the base of the saguaros and the air still has winter clarity. The lake reads bluer then. The mountains across the water hold their edges instead of dissolving into haze. From the dwelling itself, look back the way you came - the trail, the desert, the lake beyond - and you will understand why the Salado built here. They were watching something. So are you. The detail shots are inside the rooms. Hand-shaped adobe, finger marks still visible in the mortar, soot on the ceiling from fires that went out six centuries ago. Get close. This is one of those rare places where you are allowed to.

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