The Painter and the Photographer

In nineteen thirty-three, a family of four pitched camp at Mount Carmel Junction, and both parents made their living by looking. He was Maynard Dixon, a painter. She was Dorothea Lange, the photographer who took Migrant Mother, the famous picture from the Depression. They spent that summer around Zion and Mount Carmel, and Dixon fell for this country. He came back, and he kept a summer home in Mount Carmel. The home and studio is run as a living history museum. Mount Carmel Junction sits in Long Valley, and this was never empty country. Kaibab Paiute people farmed from Long Valley, in the north, all the way down the Kanab Creek oasis to the delta on the Colorado River. The settlement at Mount Carmel started out as Winsor. That name dropped off the town, but it survives in a rock name, the Winsor formation. About half a mile west of the junction with Highway eighty-nine, the road crosses a fault at least a mile long, and you'd never know it. Look around for a minute the way those two might have.