“I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll go home now.”

 – Forrest Gump, upon arriving in Monument Valley.

In my mind, this is the most iconic scene of the American West.

From a high viewpoint, the pavement stretches toward a vanishing point, with distant red buttes rising from the desert floor. It captured my imagination when I was a little boy, and it still evokes a certain longing — the melancholy of evening, a long open road inviting travel, and an impossibly novel landscape.

In my imagined version of this place, there is no other human within many miles — only Marcy, me, and our daydreams.

This very scene was featured as a backdrop in the movie Forrest Gump, at the place where Forrest turned around and ended his cross-country running. A few years after the movie, I was treated to award-winning images that members of our photography group had captured here.

We just had to go and give it our own try.

Now that I have visited, I know the place to be US Highway 163, north of the Utah-Arizona border, with a view toward the Navajo Nation’s Monument Valley preserve.

Marcy and I had traveled two hours from our place in Page, Arizona, to visit Monument Valley, which lies beyond those distant buttes. As we departed and evening approached, we figured we would drive north to find the aptly named “Forrest Gump Point” — a wide spot along the road where we could capture our own perfect version of this scene.

We were tired. A two-hour night drive across the dark desert still awaited us. But surely this little detour would be worth it.

Alas, I was deflated.

Atmospheric haze. Endless road signs. A long string of vehicles in both directions. And people. Lots of people.

Perhaps millions from around the world, watching in subtitled splendor, had learned of this place. Distill that number down to the few intrepid souls who would actually visit on any given day, and you still have quite an international crowd.

Perhaps someday I will share the dark secrets of how we managed to capture this scene devoid of cars and people.