American Southwest Road Trip – There are certain iconic images that I seem to see everywhere. Some I can shake out of my head pretty quickly, but others stick with me to the point of near-obsession. They become places that I simply need to go, see, experience, and photograph myself. And for the past year or so, images of Monument Valley, Antelope Canyon, and Horseshoe Bend were all places that I couldn’t seem to shake. And these locations were all places that I knew I would end up in a love-hate relationship with. I despise crowded places, especially in the wilderness, and all three locations that I was obsessed with are waaaaaaay too famous not to be overrun with tour buses, selfie-sticks, and duck faces.

So despite my predetermined relationship with these places, this past fall I set out on a four-day photography oriented American southwest road trip through Utah and into northern Arizona to make sure I experienced and captured images of Monument Valley along the Arizona-Utah border and then Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend outside of Page, Arizona.

And I was pretty dead-on with my expectations. These places were totally overrun – hundreds of people lining the main Monument Valley Overlook, hundreds upon hundreds more people walking shoulder-to-shoulder sucking in their guts to squeeze through the incredible slots of Antelope Canyon, and more selfie sticks than I imagined attached to idiots getting way to uncomfortably close to the edge of Horseshoe Bend, a thousand feet above the river.

But in thinking back now, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. Would I drive another 1200 miles to do it again? No. But in the end, I got the experiences and images that I set out for.