Home Care In Mexican Hat, UT

Saturday is the annular solar eclipse, and Utah is smack dab in the middle of the big shebang.

State of play: The moon will pass between the sun and Earth while it is at its farthest point from Earth, per NASA.

Details: The eclipse will first be visible at the Nevada border at 10:24am and reach the Four Corners 11 minutes later.

Zoom in: The whole "Ring of Fire" will be visible from a path that runs from about West Wendover to Monticello at its northern edge, and from the southwest corner of Millard County to Lake Powell's Wahweap Bay in the south.

Of note: The Utah Department of Transportation expects 300,000 visitors in central and southern Utah, with the biggest crowds in Richfield and Mexican Hat. Plan for hours of traffic delays after the eclipse.

Worth your time: Arches, Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef and Glen Canyon national parks and rec sites have issued crowd rules and viewing advice.

Be smart: Erin, here! My family made it to Idaho for the "zone of totality" in 2017, and there are a few things worth knowing.

It’s been 11 years since the last annular solar eclipse crossed the western United States, but on Oct. 14, millions will have a chance to see another one.

See the eclipse in Utah: Viewing locations include Baker, on the border of Nevada, Richfield, Panguitch, Monticello and Mexican Hat — with a population of less than 100 that is nestled up against the banks of the San Juan River. It can also be seen over Four Corners.

There are also prime recreation areas where it will be visible, including:

Karen Garthwait, spokeswoman for Arches and Canyonlands, said the parks are expecting big crowds at a time when they are already crowded since October is an ideal, cooler time to visit.

One of Canyonlands’ two campgrounds does offer reserved spots, but all the reserved spaces at the Needles site are already taken. The parks are bringing in extra staff to help with congestion.

“If, once the eclipse happens and everyone is trying to leave at once, that will be problematic. It would be helpful if people plan and pack some extra patience that day,” she said.

Check Canyonlands website for tips on visiting during the eclipse as well as the website for Arches.

At Bryce, park staff are expecting its “first come first serve” camping spots to fill up in advance of the eclipse as well, said spokesman Peter Densmore.

“This is, of course, depending on if we have a winter-style event that could change availability.”

Anyone visiting the great outdoors to catch a glimpse of the eclipse should come prepared with plenty of food, water, gasoline and other supplies, park officials advised.

Garthwait also said eclipse enthusiasts should:

Most hotels are at capacity or nearing capacity in San Juan County, according to a Facebook post the county put out Sept. 12. The post warned residents that supplies may be limited due to the anticipated influx of visitors, so preparations should be made in the next few weeks, specifically area residents should make sure to have a full tank of gas and stock up the refrigerator and cupboards.

Falyn Owens, executive director of Bryce Canyon County/Garfield County Office of Tourism, said hotel rooms are being snapped up quickly.

“I connected with a few hotels near Bryce Canyon and the gateway communities. They are reporting hotels being very close to capacity. A hotelier in Tropic said whenever they get a cancelation it fills back up within the hour.”

She said she also anticipates an increase in dispersed camping on nearby public lands.

“There are so many places in Garfield County to view the eclipse that we expect to see an influx in traffic on Scenic Byway 12 and the surrounding communities.”

Related

More about the Ring of Fire eclipse: An annular solar eclipse happens when the size of the moon’s disc is slightly smaller than the apparent size of the sun. As a result, only the outer edge of the sun is visible if you are in the path of the eclipse, creating a “ring of fire” both eerie and awesome.

According to the Great American Eclipse, a website chock full of just about everything you’d want to know about the Ring of Fire eclipse, it first meets up with the United States at 9:13 a.m. Pacific time at Reedsport, Oregon.

“The shadow of the moon at this point is screaming at 7,534 miles per hour. The maximum duration of annularity at the Oregon coast is 4 minutes, 29 seconds and the eclipse will be 13 degrees high in the sky,” the site said. It hits Utah in the 9:07 to 9:09 a.m. range Mountain time when the partial eclipse begins.

After that, the annular solar eclipse begins in the 10:24 a.m. range and by about 90 minutes later, the partial eclipse is over. It ends in Texas at 12:03 Central time.

Across the United States, according to the website, a little more than 6.6 million people in the United States live in the path of the eclipse. In Utah, there are 86,000 people who live in its path, and visitation to the state could bump up by as much as 314,000.

A total solar eclipse next year on April 8 bypasses Utah and most of the West. Instead, the Great Plains region and the upper East Coast will get the treat.

SAN JUAN COUNTY, UTAH, Utah — Officials in Utah are telling residents to prepare now for scarce supplies ahead of the annular eclipse that will be sweeping across most of the state on Oct. 14.

The Utah Division of Emergency Management said hotels and other lodging in the southeastern county of San Juan are reporting 95% to 100% occupancy in the days leading up to and the days after the "ring of fire" eclipse. The crush of visitors is expected to strain supplies and resources around the areas of Mexican Hat and Monument Valley, according to officials.

Emergency managers are telling residents to stock up their refrigerators and cupboards with food and drinks before tourists come into the area. Residents are also being urged to make sure their gas tanks are filled up, too.

Visitors getting a late start on planning a trip to Utah's Canyon Country do have some options of events to see the eclipse. Goosenecks State Park in Mexican Hat will have telescopes, solar binoculars, eclipse glasses and more. A longer list of events happening around the eclipse in southeastern Utah can be found here.

For the U.S., the eclipse will begin in Oregon at about 10:15 a.m. Mountain Time and sweep south-easterly crossing over parts of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas.

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Fifteen miles from Utah’s Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park, mesas the color of burnt sienna erupt from the landscape, forming what look like the banks of a dry riverbed. A cumulonimbus cloud on the move hangs above the scene; a cerulean sky hugs the edges. It’s a serene image, beautiful and barren.

But the picture becomes haunting when you realize you are looking at the former site of the Mexican Hat Disposal Cell uranium mill. The “riverbed” is actually 20 inches of riprap rock, with a 24-inch thick radon barrier beneath that. It covers 68 acres and 4.4 million tons of radioactive waste material, including a demolished school that had been constructed from contaminated matter.

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For photographer Brett Leigh Dicks, natural vistas used in the pursuit of nuclear energy, such as the one described above, offer an intriguing, if horrible, tale to tell. So, Dicks, who spends half of his time in his native Australia and the other half in Santa Barbara (he is a former Indy contributor), set about documenting myriad locations used in the production, housing, and waste of nuclear endeavors.

The result is an exhibit called, matter-of-factly, Nuclear Landscapes. The show is currently featured in the Head On Photo Festival, a decade-long program that showcases nearly 1,000 Australian and international photographers in more than 100 venues in Sydney. Although COVID-19 made that impossible physically, the festival is available virtually at headon.com.au.

I recently spoke to Leigh Dicks over email about Nuclear Landscapes. What follows is an edited version of our conversation.

What drew you to shooting nuclear landscapes? This series grew as a tangent to a body of work I started not long after arriving in Santa Barbara back in the early 2000s. I frequently visited Arizona and spent a lot of time in Tucson. A good friend of mine out there — Joey Burns — has a wonderful band called Calexico, which, in 2000, released an album called Hot Rail featuring the song “Sonic Wind.” That composition was inspired by an old nuclear missile base just south of Tucson.

I’ve spent a lot of time there over the years but until then was oblivious to the central role Tucson had played in U.S. missile defense during the Cold War, so I started looking into it. There were over a dozen of these Titan II missile installations surrounding the city, each armed with a fully fueled ICBM ready to launch at a moment’s notice, all subsequently decommissioned and abandoned.

That discovery inspired the series Opposing Forces, where I not only documented abandoned nuclear missile bases in the U.S., but also their Soviet counterparts across Eastern Europe. Doing so not only raised questions into what happened to the nuclear material when these missiles were scrapped, but where it had come from in the first place. That opened up the whole world of nuclear energy and led me and my camera to places ranging from old uranium mines and processing plants to atomic testing sites, missiles bases, submarine shipyards, nuclear reactors, sites of nuclear accidents, and waste-disposal sites.

Some of the photos show depressions in the earth, and other seemingly natural abstractions. How do you feel the images capture the reality/legacy of nuclear energy? Anyone who has seen aerial images of the Nevada Test Site will know it looks something like a crater-filled moonscape as a result of all the blasts conducted there. But what I found very haunting were less-obvious “nuclear landscapes,” like Snow Canyon State Park just outside of St. George, Utah. Snow Canyon is a gorgeous landscape featuring a canyon carved from the red and white Navajo sandstone. Yet being downwind of the Nevada Test Site, between 1951 and 1963, the area was regularly blanketed in radioactive fallout from atmospheric atomic tests.

In the mid-1950s, Dick Powell directed a Howard Hughes–produced film, The Conqueror, in Snow Canyon. The film starred John Wayne and Susan Hayward. At the end of location filming, Hughes additionally shipped 60 tons of contaminated earth from Snow Canyon back to Hollywood for reshoots. A crater left by a blast makes a very powerful statement about the might of atomic energy, but the legacy of its radioactive aftermath is less obvious. The entire cast and crew of that film were exposed to radioactive contamination and resulted in an inordinate number of them contracting cancer.

So along with documenting the physical legacy of atomic energy, I wanted to also tell some of the lesser-known “ground zero” stories. I was also intrigued by how our culture has embraced the atomic age. Las Vegas casinos used to have watch parties for the tests at the nearby Nevada Test Site and even crowned a Miss Atomic Energy. There is a bar there — Atomic Liquor — where a little of that culture is still encapsulated in the city’s famed neon glow.

Do you feel the threat of nuclear energy is understood by the masses, or accepted as basically benign? It’s a complicated science, and anything that’s complicated is difficult to grasp a thorough understanding of. And complicated processes also come with risks. There is definitely a fear factor associated with nuclear energy, and, well, there should be. We unfortunately seem to go through cycles where the ramifications of nuclear energy are dramatically brought home to us — Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. I think after Fukushima, as we sat and waited to see whether a cloud of radioactive fallout was going to be blown our way, nobody in Santa Barbara thought nuclear energy was benign. But it is certainly something we should all constantly pay more attention to.

Between 1944 and 1986, something like 30 million tons of uranium ore was extracted from the Navajo Nation in the Four Corners region. Scattered across the tribal lands are still hundreds of un-remediated uranium mines. Radiation pollution has contaminated groundwater and wells, houses and even schools were built from radioactive mine tailings, and, of course, there are the abandoned mines themselves. The EPA and Navajo Nation are identifying and addressing what is a very current and serious problem.

Tell me a bit about the Head On Photo Fest. The Head On Photo Festival has been running for over 10 years and is the largest photography festival in Australia and the second largest in the world. Staged across the month of May, the festival showcases over 900 Australian and international photo-artists in over 100 venues around Sydney.

The program is aimed equally at photographers and the general public. Along with exhibitions, it runs an extensive program of contests, workshops, seminars, artists’ talks, projections, and portfolio reviews. I was a finalist in last year’s Landscape Award, which in turn led to me being a featured photographer in the 2020 festival.

The exhibitions are staged in large and small galleries, museums, parks, cafés, and illuminations on buildings. While this year is very different due to the COVID-19 lockdown, what I love most about the festival is that it puts photography in public places where you don’t typically see it. My exhibition was planned for one of the most iconic locations in Australia: Sydney’s Bondi Beach. While it will now be an online exhibition for the month of May, the plan is to stage the physical exhibitions later in the year when restrictions are eased and a physical program is planned.

What are you working on now? I am currently preparing some prints for a Midwest-based museum that has put together an exhibition examining the legacy of photography in the American West. The exhibition is being curated by the Figge Art Museum in Iowa and is titled Magnetic West: The Enduring Allure of the American West. It features over 150 photographs by some of the most renowned photographers of the 19th and 20th centuries — and a couple from me, as well.

The plan was/is to be back in the U.S. for the opening of that exhibition at the end of June. In the meantime, I have been working on an Australian installment of Nuclear Landscapes — photographing test sites, mines, and waste sites across here — along with a new project that explores massacre sites here in Australia where colonialists massacred indigenous communities. These are events between the late 1780s and 1930s associated with what is loosely termed the Frontier Wars. There weren’t really wars, more the massacre of Aboriginal people in the process of dispossessing them of their land or as retribution for perceived crimes.

Given my family heritage, this is a very personal project. I have been researching and photographing locations throughout Australia and will continue to do so once we’re permitted to travel again. Both projects are currently on lockdown hold — so for the past month or so I am finally been taking some time to organize my archives.

NEW HAVEN — The title of “Fazal Sheikh: Exposures” begins straightforwardly enough, with the name of the photographer whose 150 images make up the show. There’s also a video, several texts, and a sound installation, by Jeffrey Ralston Moore. The show runs through Jan. 8 at the Yale University Art Gallery.

Born in New York in 1965, Sheikh’s best known for his photographs of refugees and migrants. That work is visually restrained, deeply humane, and no less deeply impassioned. It’s not inaccurate to say that Sheikh practices what one might call advocacy photography. His doing so, and doing it so well, puts him in the tradition of Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange, and in the contemporary company of Sebastião Salgado.

Good advocacy photography shows without exhorting. Clarity of execution complements clarity of purpose, making exhortation superfluous. That’s the case with “Exposures.” Which brings us back to the title. With that third word, things become more complicated. “Exposures,” in the context of the show, has multiple meanings, and all of them matter.

The most basic, of course, refers to photography. Each of those 150 images (mostly landscapes, but also portraits) is an exposed piece of film: an exposure.

There’s also exposure in the sense of revelation. That revelation can take the form of moral or ethical insight. It can also mean the revealing of something hidden and/or illicit. That’s the kind of revelation we describe as an exposé. Both meanings apply here.

Finally, there’s exposure in an ecological sense, as in exposed to the elements; and exposure in the sense of physical hazard. “Exposures” is divided into two parts. They have in common a desert location (Israel’s Negev and the American Southwest) and depredation. A desert is the kind of landscape most exposed to the elements — and in both deserts, those people who have traditionally lived there, Bedouins and such tribes as the Diné (Navajo) and Hopi have been exposed to sometimes-deadly political force. In the Southwest, there are also serious medical threats from the toxins generated by mineral extraction.

“Erasure,” the Negev section, comprises four series. The most notable is “Desert Bloom.” It consists of 48 aerial photographs of the desert, shown in a tight grid. Their soft, even chaste, dun palette makes all the more unsettling what the images show: emerging Israeli settlements, newly planted forests encroaching on Arab villages, and the remnants of Arab villages whose residents were expelled.

Another series, “Independence/Nakba,” consists of five diptychs, large black-and-white portraits, each showing an Israeli and a Palestinian born in the same year. They’re drawn from the full series, which begins in 1948, the year of Israel’s founding, and extends to 2013. The portraits are in Sheikh’s standard mode: faces filling the frame, the sitters alert and engaged, seeming as much collaborators with the photographer as subjects.

None of the persons are identified. This makes a larger point, presumably, the idea being that personal information would be a distraction from the greater concept of hoped-for reconciliation that the diptychs are meant to evoke. These are as much representative figures as individuals. That makes sense, but it also robs the sitters of a specificity that could help make a different sort of point.

There are also portraits in the other half of the exhibition, “Exposure” (yes, singular, not plural). They, too, are black and white and tightly framed. They’re of Native Americans from the Four Corners area. Each sitter is identified, and several of the portraits include lengthy statements from the subject. The texts matter a great deal. One complaint about the hanging of the show is that the wall labels should be higher and have a larger point size, to enhance readability.

As with “Erasure,” the lion’s share of images are color landscapes, most of them aerial shots. Sixty-six of them make up the series “In Place.” Sheikh took them in and around Bears Ears National Monument, in Utah. Tightly gridded, they hang in a small side gallery. They’re large, roughly 25 inches by 37 inches, but not so large as to be overwhelming. With little space between individual photographs, the images become themselves a kind of visual landscape. The cumulative effect is transfixing.

The subdued, austere beauty of the “In Place” photographs makes all the more shocking the contrast with 10 photographs in the larger gallery space (that’s where the portraits are) which show coal mines, mineral disposal sites, and the like. The juxtaposition is an implicit, and unanswerable, condemnation. The violation of the land is shocking to see. It’s like something out of the Book of Job, with the terrain as Job. These extraction-industry photographs are striking, no question. They’re unreal looking, like toxic versions of color field paintings. Looking at them, one wonders if a better term than advocacy photography might be warning photography.

FAZAL SHEIKH: EXPOSURES

At Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel St., New Haven, through Jan. 8. 203-432-0600, artgallery.yale.edu