What We Could Lose: The Four Corners Under Pressure
My wife, Jenney, and I have been exploring the Four Corners for four decades. Our first visit was as newlyweds on our first two-week car-camping trip into the area. On that whirlwind trip, we visited the Grand Canyon, Great Sand Dunes, Canyon de Chelly, Natural Bridges, Monument Valley, Lake Powell, and the western slope of the Colorado Rockies. I vividly remember wondering what lay atop the Vermilion Cliffs as we drove toward the Grand Canyon. Since then, we've returned multiple times, including a visit to White Pockets atop the Vermilion Cliffs.
High above Marble Canyon, atop the Vermillion Cliffs, sit White Pockets with its tortured rock formations. It only took four decades after seeing the Vermillion Cliffs to finally see what is up there.
Four Corners is my favorite place in America for its rich cultural history and stunning beauty. We've bounced down the dirt road into Chaco Canyon several times. We've hiked the alien landscape of the Ah Shi Ha Pah and Bisti Badlands, explored the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, camped at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon at Sowats Point in the Kaibab National Forest. That night, we were alone, with no man-made light visible in any direction. These aren't just pretty places to explore and photograph. They're the places that make you feel what America actually is — or what it can be, if we as a nation are smart enough to protect it.
The Four Corners is unlike anywhere else on Earth. Depending on how you count, there are 12-15 major National Parks or Monuments in the Four Corners region. Within a roughly 150-mile radius centered where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado meet, you find the most concentrated collection of ancient human history and stunning public landscapes in North America. Chaco Culture National Historical Park — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — was the center of the Ancestral Puebloan world from about 850 CE to its peak in about 1150 CE. The great houses at Pueblo Bonito still stand, precisely aligned with solar and lunar cycles, built by people who understood the sky as well as, or maybe even better than, Europeans at that same time. Mesa Verde preserves cliff dwellings so sophisticated that they humble modern architects with their smart natural heating-and-cooling designs and dry-framing innovations. Canyon de Chelly has been continuously inhabited for nearly 5,000 years, and dozens of Navajo families still live there today. Hovenweep's well-preserved towers balance on canyon rims like something out of a dream. Bandelier National Monument preserves the cave dwellings of the ancestors of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. Canyon of the Ancients has the highest density of archaeological sites in the country.
Fajada Butte, Chaco Canyon National Park, site of the Sun Dagger, one of the most advanced horizon astronomy instruments from the Pre-Columbian Period.
From well-known to rarely visited, fantastic vistas surprise you around every corner. Places like the Grand Canyon, Canyon de Chelly, and Capitol Reef are well known. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, the last area of the Lower 48 to be mapped, bears witness to its rugged remoteness. Always stunning are the sweeping views of the slick rock desert and Escalante Canyon from the Head of the Rocks Overlook along Utah Highway 12. Less well-known, the Bisti and Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah wildernesses’ tortured landscapes—hoodoos, petrified wood, and fossil beds—with landmarks quirkily named things like Alien Throne, Dinosaur Eggs, and King of Wings.
Alien Throne in the remote Ah-Shi-Sle-Pah Wilderness, NM
All of this sits on top of one of the most productive fossil fuel basins in the United States. All of this is at risk.
The San Juan Basin, which underlies much of northwestern New Mexico and extends into Colorado and Utah, has been an energy extraction zone for a century. Tens of thousands of oil and gas wells and pipeline infrastructure stretch in every direction. When Jenney and I drove into Angel Point, a stunning BLM overlook, on our way to Chaco, we found fantastic boondocking with views across the badlands toward the canyon country. Unfortunately, we could see a road in the gully below servicing active fracking wellheads. Half a mile behind us, new wells were being drilled. Chaco was only 34 miles away as the crow flies.
Angel Point National Recreation Area. You can see one of the many service roads for the numerous wells in the area. About a half mile behind this viewpoint are numerous wells being drilled.
For years, conservationists and Indigenous tribes pushed for a buffer zone around Chaco to keep the drilling at a safe distance. In 2023, the Biden administration finally delivered — Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, herself a member of Laguna Pueblo and the first Indigenous cabinet secretary in American history, signed an order creating a 10-mile no-drill buffer zone around Chaco. It was a 20-year administrative withdrawal covering about 336,000 acres. Not perfect — it didn't affect existing leases, and about 90 percent of San Juan Basin federal land was already leased — but it was something. A line drawn. A statement that this place matters.
That line is now being erased.
In April 2026, the Trump administration formally proposed revoking the buffer zone. The Bureau of Land Management opened a public comment period — seven days, compared to the normal multi-month period the Biden administration used to establish the protection in the first place. The Trump proposal offered two alternatives. Alternative one: revoke the buffer entirely, opening all 336,000 acres to new leasing. Alternative two: shrink the buffer from 10 miles to 5 miles, exposing an estimated 12,000 documented cultural sites to potential drilling. There was no alternative three. No option to keep what we had.
The Chaco fight doesn't stand alone. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's "Unleashing American Energy" order, signed on his first full day in office in February 2025, directed a review of all withdrawn federal lands — essentially putting every protected landscape in the crosshairs simultaneously. Bears Ears National Monument, which contains some of the most spectacular canyon country and dense concentration of archaeological sites in Utah, was already slashed by 85 percent during Trump's first term. It's under pressure again. Grand Staircase-Escalante — where I photographed Dance Hall Rock, a mile-long expanse of Navajo sandstone so remote that most people who drive through the monument never visit it — is being targeted through the Congressional Review Act, which would gut its management plan and open it to mining and drilling. Uranium mining companies are already drilling exploratory holes just outside the Bears Ears boundaries.
The complexity here is real and worth acknowledging. Many Navajo allottees whose land lies within the San Juan Basin depend on oil and gas royalties — sometimes as much as $20,000 a year — as their primary income in a region with few economic alternatives. The Navajo Nation itself sued the federal government over the original buffer zone, though the Nation's position was to shrink the buffer to five miles, as of 2026, they may support further reduction. The Trump administration cited Navajo economic concerns to justify full revocation —even though the Pueblo Nations support a wider buffer zone. This is a collision among cultural preservation, economic survival, and energy extraction that doesn't resolve cleanly.
What I know is what I've seen through a camera lens. I've photographed a full moon rising over Pueblo Bonito — a building that housed a civilization for 300 years, whose architects tracked that same moon with astronomical precision. I've watched the light change on Fajada Butte, where a spiral petroglyph on the summit was carved to mark the solstices and equinoxes, but no longer works perfectly due to present-day human interference. I've stood at the rim of Canyon de Chelly looking at Spider Rock and known that people have been standing in roughly that spot, looking at roughly that view, for nearly 5,000 years.
Moonrise over Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon NM
These places don't belong to an administration. They don't belong to an energy company. They belong to all of us — and to the Indigenous peoples whose ancestors built them, and to every generation that comes after us.
Ansel Adams understood that a great photograph was an argument for why a place deserved to exist. I'm not Ansel Adams. But I have a camera, I've been to these places, and I know what's at stake.
This is why I built this site. This is what these photographs are for – to raise awareness and help preserve America’s stunning beauty for all our grandchildren and their grandchildren’s children.