I was first exposed to the American southwest in the summer of 1971. I'd spent a good deal of my life overseas due to my father's professional commitments. The opportunity to travel throughout the United States that summer followed completion of a graduate degree and a desire to see a country that I was shortly to professionally represent abroad as a foreign service (diplomatic) officer with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I was struck that summer by the immensity of the regions through which I traveled and the country as a whole. But a December 2010 trip back to the region followed a retirement some years earlier and a much more focused concentration on a life-long photography hobby. It was this photographic focus and interest that left me much more affected by the "cathedral-like" quality to much of what I saw and photographed. It is in that spirit that it occurred to me to share here a small collection of images that most evoked this "cathedral quality."