It was a rare treat to stand where I was. Even more considering there was a thundering herd of wild Navajo horses trampling the land straight towards me. But I would not move and held my ground, for I trusted the Navajo wranglers to steer their quarry away from me as they galloped by. My position could not move, for this was the shot I had worked so hard to get -- the one that exemplified and honored so many scenes in Director John Ford's western movies -- the one that captured John Ford Point and the legendary Three Sisters in the background.

To see Ford's Monument Valley Westerns is to see breathtaking scenery, what one guide vividly describes as "great mesas, buttes, sandstone pinnacles, spires, fins and arches, all monuments to 500 million years of giant earth uplifts and the perpetual forces of erosion," not merely photographed but raised to the level of iconography.