Here are Gregg Lowrimore’s pictures and PhotoBlog, and Lori Stone’s Pictures from the same trip.
We got up at the standard photographers sunrise time of of 5:15am to start driving to Mesa Arch for sunrise.
By the time we got there, it resembled standard weekend combat photography (people standing shoulder to shoulder). , passed on the trail by a rather rude individual running in. About 10 people already there, shoulder to shoulder.
All but one of them were literally taking shot after shot of the same exact thing from the same exact place. Gregg, Lori and I were all over the place, shooting many different angles. I just don’t understand how come people aren’t looking for anything but the one shot
About 10 minutes after sunrise, everybody else left, and we stayed and shot for a good hour or more. The visuals were stunning, the terrain was amazing.
Walking back to the parking lot, we got our first look at Cryptobiological soil. Very weird, and everywhere. We also got our first look and the two ravens who would appear to follow us everywhere for the next couple days.
From there, we took a quick, short drive down to Buck Canyon, where I got to stand on my first of quite a few cliff walls. Lori wanted none of this, and tended to walk away when I did this.
From there, we drove all the way south to Grand View Point Overview. Boy, is Grand View Point a misstatement. But I supposed “Staggeringly beautiful vistas from 1000 feet above unbelievable colors and sights” was too hard to fit on the signs!
Curiosity got the best of us as we drove back to see what the heck an Upheaval Dome is. It was a short walk in but, while worth the walk, very hard to convey in pictures. The part I can’t believe is that they still don’t know whether it was caused by an upthrust of a salt deposit from a magma chamber, or a meteor exploding over the area. Really. They still don’t know which of those are the cause.
From the Upheaval Dome, we drove over to the Green River Overlook. It was a serious panorama vista point, and I have some work to do joining some images for the panorama images.
From the Green River Overlook, we drove over to Dead Horse Point State Park, scouting for sunset shooting locations. It was an interesting location, but for a state park, it was pretty small. From the overlook, you’re looking straight down over 2000 feet at the Colorado River.
Unfortunately, while scouting for locations, I stepped on rock the wrong way, and rolled my left ankle (tearing two tendons in the process). The echos of my yelps of pain echoed off the canyon walls while I sat down and quickly tightened up my boot as much as I could bear, knowing that was going to be a necessity to get back to the truck. Thankfully I had the tripod for the camera there to use as a partial crutch. I hobbled back to the truck, and we threw what ice we had in a bag, threw the bag on my ankle and headed back into Moab (which was the plan anyway) rest until sunset (and buy a new ankle brace 🙂
Unfortunately we weren’t thinking straight about lighting in a 2000 foot deep canyon with vertical walls, so we got back for sunset about 30 minutes too late. We got a couple good pictures, but not necessarily of the views. This Bonsai tree at the point was beautiful in the fading sunlight, though.
We stopped for dinner on the way home at the Moab Brewery. They had good food (although our waiter left quite a bit to be desired), a great Oatmeal Stout, and a decent musician. Of course, they put us as far from the front door as possible so I’d have to limp my way in to the back corner 🙂
We got back to our townhouse, took my boot off, and found half a baseball on my left ankle. I threw more ice on it, started processing pictures, and when I realized that I wasn’t really all with it, took two Advil, crawled up the stairs, and went to bed about 9:30pm
One trip I want to take next time I come up is up Potash Road to look “up” at the bluffs, maybe even on the White Rim Road (a 4×4 trail on the East of the park). I also want to get down into the Needles area, as I’ve heard that’s a fantastic location similar to, but not similar to Bryce. But it was a hundred miles in “the other direction”.
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