After watching the first installment of Ken Burns’ excellent National Parks documentary, I felt enjoined to post images of my favorite Park, Canyonlands in Utah. I visited seven National Parks over the summer, and Burns is better able to articulate in a more clear, concise manner than I ever could the rage of conflicting emotions one feels when visiting National Parks during the height of summer tourist season. I could never shake the feeling that there was something profoundly wrong about paying $20 to get into the Grand Canyon and waiting an hour in a Los-Angeles-level traffic jam just to walk along a paved path at the edge of the South Rim amongst a crowd of pedestrians that feels more like 34th Street than the wide open, untamed West. Again, the same principle from The Lightning Field applies—by our very presence, we as tourists spoil the previously unspoiled place we came to see. Lightning Field attempts to subvert this by imposing a six-person daily quota, which would be antithetical to the National Parks democratic mandate. Somewhere in between these two extremes lies Canyonlands, which is why I liked it so much. There was none of the technicolor brilliance that makes other parks such postcard opportunities. Here it was more subtle, but no less sublime. And it brought back a healthy respect for the dangers of landscape, where simple things like water, food and sun become such important, precious commodities when you’re alone, no one for miles, at mile marker seven on a fourteen-mile hike.

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