Persistence of Time

You can watch the light leave. It comes off the valley floor first and then climbs the buttes, and from where I was standing you could see the line move — not infer it afterwards from the frames, actually watch it travel up the rock. It puts a clock on everything. You’re not waiting for the light so much as chasing it up a wall.

Monument Valley is a Navajo Tribal Park, not a national park — worth saying since it’s easy to assume otherwise.

One week into a two week trip in an Escape camper van on a loop out of Vegas, and Monument Valley was one of the few nights we took an actual room. Staying on site is the whole point: you get the place at sunrise and sunset instead of arriving into the middle of the day like everyone else. First week of March, 2018.

The terrace above me was surely full. I’d gone down below it onto a rock outcrop, and there was one other photographer down there and nobody else.

The title is meant plainly, not as a joke about melting clocks. Those buttes are what’s left after everything around them went; the valley floor used to be up where their tops are. Standing in front of that at the end of a day, while the light climbs off them at a speed you can see, is a strange sort of arithmetic.

I shot a phone timelapse of that sunset as well. I still pull it up now and then to appreciate the moment and watch how quickly the scene changed with the light.