“Water is life. People in the cities take it for granted and water their plants and grass. Here it’s precious. We think of water as a deity.”—Tom Holiday, Navajo Nation resident
Tim Holiday on a pinnacle above his family home in Monument Valley. Like many Diné, Tim feels his demands for running water amount to shouts in the wind. (July 16, 2024 – Monument Valley, UT)
For tens of thousands of citizens living in the Navajo Nation, clean water is considered highly valuable and something not taken for granted, due to the fact more than one in three residents don’t have ready access to it.
For his project, A Question of Balance, photographer Elliot Ross documented the lives of two very different communities, living 80 miles apart, who use a shared water supply (the Colorado River Basin).
From the press release:
Predominantly Mormon residents of Utah’s Washington County, with its urban areas sprawling, enjoy the luxury of some 2,500 swimming pools, 17 golf courses, and irrigated farming. Over in the Navajo Nation, America’s largest Native reservation, more than one in three Diné must haul water to their rural homes; lacking running water in their households through the long, hot summer.
Making things worse for Diné, many of their rivers and springs are still contaminated with cancer-causing chemical elements such as uranium, nickel, and arsenic—a consequence of extensive Cold War-era uranium mining on Navajo land.
A Question of Balance is published by KGP Monolith and funded by the Center for Contemporary Documentation and the Magnum Foundation.
Goulding, Utah, is the hub of Monument Valley and the only place in this vast stretch of the Navajo Nation with basic utilities like piped water, electricity, phone and internet. A quiet struggle for water endures here. An unassuming garden spigot supplies a couple hundred residents with drinking water, some of whom are an hour’s drive away. This is the epicenter of life—the literal watering hole where you’ll find most families at least three times a week filling water tanks to bring back to their dry homes. (November 24, 2023 – Goulding, UT)The rapid pace of land development across Washington County, UT is illustrated in these photographs of the Long Valley development taken 18 months apart. For years, Washington County has been among the fastest growing metro areas in the nation. Its population has grown 1,210% since 1970 to 197,680 residents as of 2022. The Kem Gardner Institute projects a maximum carrying-capacity of 950,000 people for this once quiet Mormon agricultural county. This growth is exemplified by sprawling new master-planned communities like “Long Valley,” a 600-acre development by D.R. Horton–the nation’s largest homebuilder.
(top: July 7, 2024 / bottom: December 18, 2025 – Washington County, UT)“My kids would say, ‘Mom, did we ever have running water?’” Linda Jackson says. “And I would say, ‘Kids, we did all the running.’” In the dry bathroom built separate from her house in Monument Valley, Linda washes her hair in a tub she fills with water hauled in from Goulding, Utah a half hour away.
(June 30, 2024 – Monument Valley, AZ)On a green bounded by an ancient lava flow, a golfer takes a swing at the Black Desert Resort. Recently completed at a cost of $2 billion, it’s the newest of 17 golf courses within a half hour’s drive of St. George. The Washington County Water Conservancy District estimates that one in twelve gallons of its water goes to keeping this grass alive—contributing to the county’s ranking as one of the thirstiest places in the nation.
(June 2, 2024 – Washington County, UT)Florence Neztsosie sits for a portrait in her kitchen that was connected to the power grid for the first time two weeks previously. Florence, who is nearly 90 years old, still does not have access to running water and relies on her grandson, Eli, to fill her water tanks each week.
(December 15, 2025 – Navajo Mountain, AZ)A 2.4 acre, four-million-gallon private swimming pool with a half-mile shoreline, sits at the heart of Desert Color–a new master planned community in Washington County–one of approximately 2,500 pools in the county. Fed by the developer’s groundwater wells, it is one of the ten largest freshwater pools in the world. (June 1, 2024 – Washington County, UT)Luna Stevens takes a dip on a hot summer’s day in the uranium contaminated Little Colorado River that runs adjacent to her family’s farm near Cameron, Arizona.In Monument Valley, Tim Holiday embraces the first rain in months–signaling the arrival of monsoon season. Across the region, summer monsoonal storms in the form of short-lived intense downpours provide the majority of the year’s precipitation. Without costly dams and major infrastructure like Washington County has been able to build, Navajo communities remain unable to capture the water for use. (June 7, 2024 – Monument Valley, UT)
