For National Geographic’s September 2022 cover, Stephen Wilkes photographed a Day To Night time-lapse of Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.
Wilkes created the cover image from 44 out of the thousands of frames captured throughout a 36-hour period, during a rare planetary alignment and on the same weekend as Easter Sunday, Passover, and Ramadan—which typically coincide only once every 33 years.
“It was a celestial experience but also a spiritual connection that makes you think back to earlier civilizations and, in particular, Indigenous culture—how it embraced what [people] were seeing in the stars and how that translated into their daily lives.”
The cover story also highlights J Bar L Ranch in Montana, Shi Shi Beach in Washington State, and New Orleans’ City Park in breathtaking scope. The distinct locations featured in the article each have a compelling history important to the 30 x 30 initiative, which aims to maintain biodiversity and help fight the climate crisis by protecting 30% of our nation's natural environment by 2030.
In What It Takes to Keep America Beautiful, an episode of the NatGeo podcast Overheard, Wilkes gives an inside look at his creative process for the cover image and shares the unique challenges he faced in order to capture the passage of time in a single final image.
Listen to the episode here and read more from the story behind the cover.
