Totem Pole and Yei Bi Chei

Author's Comments

The Totem Pole rises so improbably thin that the first time I saw it, late afternoon in October, I genuinely could not reconcile what I was looking at. Four hundred and fifty feet of sandstone holding itself up against nothing. Beside it, the Yei Bi Chei formation stands in a procession that the Navajo named for the spirit dancers, and once you have heard the name you cannot unsee it. The figures are walking. They have been walking for a very long time. You cannot reach this place on your own, and I think that is part of what makes it work. The guided tour is not a formality. It is the entire experience. You ride out into the backcountry with someone whose family has known these formations for generations, and the spires reveal themselves slowly, the way they should. Sunset is when the photograph happens. The spires backlit, going almost black against a sky that turns through orange into something deeper, the dust kicked up by the truck still hanging in the air and catching the last light. A wide lens for the procession, a longer lens for the Totem Pole alone, isolated against whatever color the sky decides to give you. The detail shots come on the way back, when the side light rakes across the desert floor and every ripple in the sand throws its own small shadow. Spring and fall are the seasons. Summer is too hot and the light flattens. I would come in late October if I could choose, when the air is clear and the days are short enough that golden hour does not require waiting until nine at night.

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