Monument Valley at first light — the Mittens and Merrick Butte emerging from desert shadow. The Navajo Nation has administered this valley for centuries. The silence here is physical.
The day that should have been a transit day became, through a combination of good fortune and slightly poor map-reading, one of the best photography days of the entire trip. The route south from Moab toward Monument Valley passes through country that insists on being stopped at, repeatedly, without warning or mercy.
We stopped first at Goosenecks State Park, near Mexican Hat, Utah, which is either very well named or not well named at all depending on your tolerance for anatomical topography. The San Juan River, at this point in its journey, has carved a canyon a thousand feet deep — and then, through a geological process that geomorphologists call "incised meanders," has proceeded to loop back on itself in curves so extreme that the river travels six miles of horizontal distance to make forward progress of just one mile. From the canyon rim, looking down, the loops of the river are visible simultaneously, a ribbon of silver turning back on itself again and again in the canyon far below.
The problem was that twenty-eight millimetres was not wide enough to capture it. A rectilinear lens at any angle we tried cropped the context that makes the Goosenecks comprehensible. The drone was the answer. We flew it from the canyon rim, perpendicular to the river, gaining enough altitude to see three or four of the meanders simultaneously, the context clicking into place from five hundred feet up in a way it absolutely refused to do from the ground. This is the drone's proper use: not as a toy, but as access to the perspective the scene demands.
Monument Valley requires no introduction and resists most attempts at one. The sandstone buttes — the East and West Mitten Buttes, Merrick Butte, the Saddleback, the Three Sisters — rise hundreds of feet from a desert floor so flat and so reddish-brown that the formations appear to have been placed there by a hand with strong opinions about visual drama. They have been in approximately this configuration for seventeen million years, give or take, the surrounding softer rock long since eroded away by wind and water, leaving these harder formations standing as monuments to geological durability.
The valley is administered by the Navajo Nation — not the National Park Service — and has been home to the Diné people for centuries before any camera was pointed at it. The admission goes to the Navajo Nation tribal government. The significance of the landscape is not decorative; it is historical, spiritual, and ongoing. We drove the valley road slowly and said very little.
We stopped at the US-163 viewpoint — the Forrest Gump pullout, so called because this is where the 1994 film placed its famous scene of Tom Hanks running down a road toward two gigantic buttes, and subsequently because approximately every visitor who has seen the film stands here and tries to replicate the shot, with variable success. The composition is real: the road does recede precisely toward the buttes. The light at golden hour is as good as advertised. We waited for the light we wanted and we got something close to it.
And then, off the guidebook entirely, off every itinerary we'd seen, unmarked by any sign or facility, standing in the desert on Navajo Nation land: two enormous sandstone pillars known as the Elephant Feet. They stand perhaps eighty feet tall, roughly shaped by erosion into something that, viewed at the right angle, suggests the grey legs of something large and ancient and deeply unconcerned with your visit. No car park. No trail. No interpretation board. Just standing there in the desert, enormous and companionable, waiting for people who know they exist. The off-guidebook stop is always the gift. This was a generous one.
"The off-guidebook stop is always the gift. The Elephant Feet were a generous one."
Photography Notes — Episode Ten
Conditions: Clear skies, golden hour light at Monument Valley, strong afternoon shadow in the valley floor by mid-afternoon. Dusty access roads.
The drone at Goosenecks: The essential tool here. Fly high enough to encompass at least three meanders simultaneously — this is the perspective that communicates the geological impossibility of the formation. Shoot both DNG and video. The video clip of flying along the river meander from the rim outward is one of the more striking things you'll capture on the trip.
The Forrest Gump pullout: The composition is at its best in golden hour — low sun from the west catches the buttes' western faces while the road falls into warm shadow. Shoot from as low as you can manage — even six inches off the tarmac changes the relationship between road surface and buttes meaningfully. A wide-angle at f/11 gives you road-to-formation sharpness.
Elephant Feet — the off-guidebook gift: Without a defined viewpoint, you earn your composition. Walk completely around the formations first. The most interesting angle is the one that places them against each other at a slight diagonal. A wide-angle close to the base maximises their apparent height. Include a person for scale — the human figure makes the geological scale legible.
Monument Valley road perspective: Standard, yes. Still requires patience. Drive the valley road in both directions and note the changing light quality on the butte faces at different times of day. The first light of morning catches the eastern faces of the Mittens in a way that is categorically different from any other time. Budget for an early start.
