New Book ‘Searching for Tao Canyon’ Has Stunning Photos
Forty years in the making, the book Searching For Tao Canyon chronicles in razor-sharp Kodachrome film and text a decade’s worth of exploration in the subterranean world of the American desert, long before it was Instagrammed to death.
“A stunning book of retro, mind-bending photography that unlocks a hidden world of natural wonder, personal reflection and outdoor adventure.”
In the early 1970s, photographer Art Twomey stumbled across a narrow crack in the desert floor in northern Arizona. It was a slot canyon, a stone crevasse carved by water and wind, its interior lost in shadow when seen by a curious person peering in from the rim.
For over a decade, Canadians Art Twomey and Pat Morrow, and Jeremy Schmidt (from Wyoming) alternated between spring and fall seasons hauling their cameras through the wildest, most intricately carved slot canyons they could find.
At the time, slots were virtually unknown, their exquisite beauties not yet appreciated. There were no guidebooks, no guided tours, no high-resolution satellite images to work from.
A big part of the pleasure was a sense of discovery, of inadvertently helping to invent the sport of technical canyoneering, of finding places no one knew.
A unique aspect to this book is that, rather than being a “connect the dots” handbook to locate hitherto secret places, it’s more of a guide to the soul of the desert – in all the years of having their enigmatic canyon photos published in magazines and books worldwide, they used pseudonyms in order to protect the delicate whorled sandstone features. And by choosing the name for this book (Tao means simply “The Way” in Chinese), they have continued on this trajectory.
On a recent return visit to the Southwest, Morrow and Schmidt visited some of their old haunts. Many are still wild and unchanged, but one in particular sees a “line dance” of mostly international visitors capped at 2500 a day. Of those, 40% are from Asia, 40% from Europe, and 20% domestic.
With this book, they hope to build a heightened appreciation for what the untamed nature of canyon country can teach us, and the need for an adoring public to do everything we can to protect it…from being loved to death.
Not to mention from the usual rapacious suspects: mining, oil and gas interests who have just got the green light from the Trump administration to tear down the thin veil of protection previously on offer by Bears Ears and Escalante/Grand Staircase National Monuments.
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