Foto Friday: Rock With Wings

I shot this at dawn, standing at a gate outside Shiprock, New Mexico. The Navajo call it Tsé Bitʼaʼí, which means “rock with wings,” and once you watch it come up out of the flat desert like that, the name makes complete sense. It’s the neck of an old volcano, close to 1,600 feet of rock standing alone on a plain that runs flat in every direction.

The name comes from more than one Navajo story. In some, a great bird carried the ancestral Diné here and turned to stone, which is where “rock with wings” comes from. In others it belongs to Monster Slayer, one of the Hero Twins, who killed the winged monsters that once nested on the peak. I’m an outsider to all of it, so I won’t pretend to tell it properly. What I know for certain is that it’s sacred ground. You can’t climb it, and you can’t drive out past a certain point without a guide from the Navajo Nation. So I didn’t. I stood at the gate where the public road ends and made my photograph from there, which felt like the right way to meet a place like this anyway. You don’t have to stand on top of something to feel how big it is.

The light was doing the thing it does for about ten minutes at dawn, warm on the east face while the rest of it stayed in shadow. I waited for it, made the frame, and left the rest of the ground to the people it belongs to.

More of my work is at imagesbyericbrown.com , and I post more of this work on Instagram .