Ute Mountain Tribal Park

Author's Comments

You drive south from Cortez and the land opens in a way that feels almost private. Mesa Verde is just over the ridge, drawing its crowds, and here the canyons stay quiet. Ute Mountain Tribal Park is not a place you wander into. You arrange a tour through the tribal office, you meet your guide in Towaoc, and then you follow a dirt road into the Mancos River canyon for the better part of a day. The cliff dwellings are extraordinary, and they are not roped off. You climb the ladders. You stand inside the rooms. Your guide, who is Ute, tells you what the Ancestral Puebloan sites mean to the people who live on this land now, which is a different thing than what they mean in a museum. For the camera, this is canyon country at its most layered. The dwellings are tucked into shadow under the rim, and the trick is morning light, when the sandstone glows on the opposite wall and the alcoves stay cool and blue. The contrast is severe at midday and the photographs go flat. Petroglyph panels are best in raking light, early or late, when the pecked stone catches its own small shadow. Bring a wide lens for the canyon, a longer one for detail work on the masonry and the glyphs. Bring more water than you think you need. The road requires real clearance and the day is long. What stays with me is not any single frame. It is the silence in the canyon and the sense that you have been allowed somewhere, briefly, by people who have been here a very long time.

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