Indian Service Road 7900/7950 is the most direct way into Chaco Canyon from the northeast, crossing through the Navajo Nation from Nageezi. It is a rough, rocky, washboard of a dirt track, and it traverses through layer after layer of high desert geologic time with little human presence to mark its passing. On our way to greet a Chaco morning last fall we were stopped by one of the most intense sunrises I have ever seen. The sky was a fire of flaming stratus streamers, whose show I wanted to anchor with a bit of mesa line and chaparral. Without the assistance of my 5-stop graduated neutral density filter to open up some detail in the foreground, the chaparral and mesa would have become silhouettes.  A focal length of 187mm was sufficiently telephoto to somewhat magnify the clouds and mesa, yet with enough angle-of-view to give a sense of the enormity of the cloud cover. An aperture of f/18, given the camera-to-subject distance, provided depth-of-field; and combined with a shutter speed of 1/5th second at ISO 100, it created a slightly darker-than-medium overall exposure. I wondered what the ancients would have thought.