Mary Colter's Desert View Watchtower creates an illusion of age through a concealed reality: workers built a concrete and steel reinforced superstructure and then applied a veneer of native stone. Its weathered stone exterior creates the effect of a structure rising from the canyon. Colter and her masons carefully selected stones, insisting that any tool mark would be a conspicuous scar on the face of the walls. The 70 foot tower and 40 foot diameter kiva speak to the knowledge and talent of the ancestral masons.