AA-2026-BD80EB
On the image
Deep inside an Arizona canyon in 2002, a dry wash runs between walls of Precambrian schist and limestone that took five million years to carve and look it. The channel is bone dry, as it is for most of the year, which is the condition every day-hiker prefers and every flash-flood warning sign is there to remind you is entirely temporary.
The layered butte rising beyond the canyon mouth is the kind of formation that appears in a thousand geology textbooks, each stratum a chapter of continental history that no one who drove out from Phoenix on a Saturday morning is going to read. The gap between the walls frames it with the accidental precision of a viewfinder, which is how canyon country rewards the person willing to walk far enough into the shade to turn around.
Arizona's slot canyons became one of the defining landscape destinations of the early 2000s, each one understood by visitors as a personal discovery despite the parking lot at the trailhead. This one has no one in it, which either means it was genuinely remote or it was nine in the morning.
Visually related — by likeness
Dry Wash Slot Canyon, Arizona Desert, 2002. 2002. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-BD80EB. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/dry-wash-slot-canyon-arizona-desert-2002.
@misc{aaAA2026BD80EB,
title = {Dry Wash Slot Canyon, Arizona Desert, 2002},
year = {2002},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-BD80EB},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/dry-wash-slot-canyon-arizona-desert-2002}
}TY - ART TI - Dry Wash Slot Canyon, Arizona Desert, 2002 PY - 2002 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-BD80EB UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/dry-wash-slot-canyon-arizona-desert-2002 ER -
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