Ansel Adams was a pivotal 20th-century photographer and environmentalist of the American landscape. After extensive travel through the West, Adams developed an eye for the grandeur and beauty of the world around him and used photography as his means for communicating it. His website remembers him as such: "Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment. Over the years he attended innumerable meetings and wrote thousands of letters in support of his conservation philosophy to newspaper editors, Sierra Club and Wilderness Society colleagues, government bureaucrats, and politicians. However, his great influence came from his photography. His images became the symbols, the veritable icons, of wild America" (-www.anseladams.com). In this photograph, Adams captures the silent relationship between two massive plateaus. They form a canyon that narrows into the shadows created by one towering formation on the other. The sparse clouds in the expanse of sky above mirror the brush of the desert floor below, conveying the sense of space felt by Adams, or anyone subject to the minimized human scale, in reference to the formations. Adams conveys the wonder and magnitude of the formations, inciting in the viewer a certain appreciation for their presence felt via photograph alone.