Mile 8282 – Cortez, Colorado. We started out with a tour of Upper Antelope Canyon, near Page, Arizona. Whereas Grand Canyon is truly grand and impossible to capture in pictures, Antelope Canyon is very small and intimate— and equally impossible to capture in pictures. The canyon is a “wash” that drilled through a sandstone ridge, creating a cave without a ceiling. The periodic floods carved out amazing patterns in sandstone, as if conceived by an abstact artist.
Then we went to Monument Valley on the Arizona/Utah border. There is a visitor center now, run by the Navajo nation. We later passed by Four Corners, the only point where four US states meet. I was at both places years ago and do not remember any fees.
It is with hesitation that I criticize the Navajo for doing this. We drove through dreadfully poor and depressing Navajo villages— a bunch of shacks made of cheap building materials. White man put them on reservations, and made them dependent and addicted to western amenities without the means of obtaining them. Now we are “enlightened” and teach them capitalism, or more accurately: Greed. So, I can’t begrudge them casinos and high-fee parks, but I don’t like it. Culturally, this is a raw deal for both.
Vintage Postcard Project: September 14: Shiprock, New Mexico
[Photographs © 2012 P.J. Gardner. All Rights Reserved.]