Early in my photography career, I explored remote areas of the American Southwest for several years. My focus was the Colorado Plateau, a vast expanse of elevated land covering much of the Intermountain West, flat on top—with a few small mountain ranges—yet deeply carved by rivers and creeks. A river in the desert may seem unlikely, but there are several, most notably the Colorado River and its numerous tributaries. One of these, located on the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona, is Kaibito Creek.

This remote seasonal stream is visited less frequently now than in the past, and even then, visitors were rare. In 1998, a few years after this photo was taken, the Navajo Reservation closed the creek and its canyon to public access, as tribe members had too often been called to rescue injured hikers. Composed of Navajo Sandstone, which formed from lithified dunes originating from the region's distant geological past, the stone has the quality of being beautifully carved by wind and rainstorms. A violent downpour, which can occur during summer monsoons, may cause flash floods that scour and shape the canyon walls, filling the bottom with mud and tree trunks, especially in the narrow ‘slot canyons.’

I entered the Upper Kaibito Canyon below a water tank off a dirt road, miles from any town or habitation. As I walked down a sandy swale, the entrance to the canyon, initially invisible, suddenly came into view. Almost immediately underfoot, I nearly fell into this subterranean world straddling its steeply sloped side walls of the V-shaped gorge, its base so narrow that walking is impossible unless carefully angling sideways along the basin’s track. Though I stayed up on top, placing my legs on either side of the narrow, precarious gully, I carefully planted the legs of my camera’s tripod on any outcrop of rock that would support it as I photographed with my view camera.

The canyon was deeply shadowed; light primarily came from other reflective surfaces, creating a subtle twilight glow in the mid-afternoon. There are other accessible and equally beautiful slot canyons in the region. However, this one fascinated me because I was peering down into a crevasse that closed in on itself, which I could barely peer into because of the deep darkness. Sometimes, a photograph can convey more than what I experience, as in this case, where the canyon’s beauty and strangeness produced an image that revealed much more than I could see.