Utah eScape

Utah eScape

In October 2001, we visited southern Utah for a combination vacation and workshop. This workshop was through the Great American Photographic Workshops (GAPW) and was held in the Boulder Area, beside the Staircase-Grand Escalante National Monument (hereafter SGE). Boulder is a very, very small place but which has three pretty good restaurants.

Utah is home to many beautiful parks, including Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands, Staircase-Grand Escalante and Capital Reef, to name a few. While some of these are over photographed (i.e. it's more of a challenge to find something unique), the SGE area is more fertile in that regard.

The GAPW workshops have a fair amount of class time, used to study students work that they bring for critique, plus early morning and late afternoon photo field sessions. We had pretty good weather overall but did lose a couple of sunsets due to clouds coming in at inopportune times.

The vacation part started in Zion. I have two photos I really like from there (two colour that is, plus a couple in B&W that I have still to work on). The first one is in Taylor Creek Canyon, up more on the northern limits of the park. When you hike to the end of the trail, you end up in a natural amphitheater. In the early to middle part of the day you get wonderful reflected light on the south wall from the north wall that makes the rock glow a strong orange-red.

The second photo is in the Narrows section of the main park. For these areas, you have to wade up the river which in most cases is not too deep (sometimes up to your waist though). We only hiked up a few kilometers, although it is possible to go about 40 before you get out of the canyon. This photo was taken at about the furthest point we hiked in, but it was starting to get late so we had to turn back. I am happy to announce that this photograph won the Jurists Choice Award at the Bluff's Gallery Juried Photographic Show in May 2002.

There are some great opportunities when leaving Zion to the East, wonderfully sculpted rocks, but we did not have time to stop much this trip since we had to get to Boulder that evening. I have one B&W that may turn out to be very interesting however . . . . (need more of that darkroom time !)

We did not spend any time in Bryce either, but had a great time a few years ago. If you have never been, it's worth the exertion to hike down into the canyon and spend the day. We ended up in Boulder, ready to begin the workshop.

The workshop was organized by Cliff Zenor of GAPW, and we had two very interesting photographers leading the session -- Jack Dykinga whom I have talked about before, and Jeff Foott who I was meeting for the first time. One of the interesting things about having two fine photographers to bounce ideas off at the same time (instead of the normal one) was the very different viewpoints they could bring to the same subject.

One of the first mornings we went up to capture the moon setting over Boulder Mountain as well as the sunrise. When we arrived, I hiked up the mountain a ways as quickly as possible to try to capture this beautiful magenta light. I only had time to shoot one sheet of film before the light faded. I dodged the sky in-camera a bit but the moon was way too bright -- I needed to do more dodging to try to get some detail in the moon but with only time for the one shot, I will just have to try this type of shot again in the future. This was a 10 second exposure for the foreground, about the longest you can do before the moon starts to smear across the sky.

The second morning we went back up the mountain to a patch of aspens that had turned red instead of the far more typical yellow (it depends on how they get frost bit in the fall). The extra bright red they turned in the super-warm first light made your eyes hurt !

One evening we went out to the Devils Garden where I took this simple shot of one of the strange rock formations. In the sky above was a wonderful fine, mare's tail cloud formation which contrasted wonderfully with the dark blue of the sky (shot with a polarizer here to emphasize it even more). This cloud looked like it was moving nicely across the sky so I waited awhile for it to move into the picture. However, as it turned out, it was forming on the leeward side as fast as it evaporated on the forward side, with the result that while it kept changing, it stayed just out of my composition ! Frustrating, but very common in this area. A similar problem to the rain called Virga -- it appears to be raining but the rain evaporates before it reaches the ground because of the intense dryness of the desert.

We spent quite a bit of time in Long Canyon, an entrance way to SGE. High red sandstone walls facing north and south gave some great reflected light opportunities in the mid morning and mid afternoon, as well as grazing light late in the afternoon (texture-lighting the face of the cliffs). I will post a couple of interesting shots soon.

There was some great potential light in the early morning in the huge valley at the end of long canyon. Two problems quickly became apparent -- first, the valley is HUGE, and we didn't have a year to properly explore it, so we never got that far from Long Canyon, and second, clouds decided to block first light both mornings. Even so, this is one of my favorite shots of the trip, taken about 30 minutes after sunrise. I like the way the clouds and the foreground rocks mimic the notch of the mountains. Plus, the friendly moon snuck in at the top right edge.

After the end of the workshop, I went with Jack to a special spot which would have been quite mind-blowing in good late light. However, quite a major storm was coming up and we did not have much time to shoot, in fact I only had time for one shot before the rains came (and stayed for the rest of the night). With a bit of luck, the heavy dark clouds opened up a bit with a bright spot, lending a strong dramatic turn to a scene that had been previously "just" foreboding. We had to drive quite a ways to make our next hotel that night, over the top of Boulder Mountain. The locals said it should not be too bad a drive since the hunters had chased away all the deer. We think they chased them all across the road because we saw 11 deer and 14 elk that night ! Thankfully, they behaved themselves and did not jump out JUST in front of any vehicle as they normally are wont to do.

The next morning in Torrey, we looked out the window and quite a bit of snow had fallen on the upper parts of the mountain. We went back up on Boulder Mountain to see if we could find some snow and aspen shots but the snow had fallen too far from the road to make that possible with the time we had (the road was on the East side of the mountain, but the snow fell on the Western side). So we went back through Torrey and into Capital Reef.

Clouds once again foiled some of the photo ops during both magic hours, but some close ups were interesting. We came across an area with ripple sandstone, the fossilized leftovers of an old sandbar. The grazing light made interesting patterns with the grass and stone but the wind made it tough to get a motionless shot (exposure was 1 second). We spent quite a bit of time exploring parts of the back country in the middle part of the day when colour photography is not great. This will be a place to go back and explore later. We also spent a wonderful afternoon hiking up Cottonwood Wash where we came across a number of detail images, including this one of dried mud. Although I try to keep images true-to-life, I had to digitally edit out a remnant footprint on the front-center of the image on this one, which had almost but not quite weathered away.

We then continued towards Canyonlands, but we made an early morning stop in Goblin Valley. Quite a fascinating place, but also one of those confusing places where there is so much complexity in the landscape it is hard to "capture" the essence in a photo, at least when you only have a few hours. I had some problems with film here which I have yet to explain, but one that turned out is the only goblin that had weathered to form a set of eyes -- we call this the Goblin King. Careful examination seemed to indicate that this was natural weathering and not a result of human tampering (but you can never be sure).

We arrived in the southern part of Canyonlands and had a wonderful first sunset. This is a sweep of weathered light coloured rock that capped a layer of red rock that really glowed in the late afternoon light. Another shot in B&W will be posted soon of a weathered branch on similar light coloured rock. This was an interesting shot which maximized the benefits of a view camera -- a strong front shift to get my shadow out of the picture, a rear swing and a strong back tilt to put the plane of focus across the rock.

The next day we started early and went for an all day hike into the Needles area. While we started out in hazy sun (which allowed this photo, which really captures the essence of the area) it quickly became heavily overcast which did nothing for the red colours. It got to look very ominous and since it was not our intention to become lightning rods, we cut the hike short and went back -- even so we hiked about 17.5 km, which was a long day with a 22 kg back pack !

We drove through a section of Canyonlands in the 4WD but since it was the middle of the day, not too many photo-ops. One, though, stood out, when there were these incredible mare's tail patches of clouds that went through in a repeating series. Against a dark blue sky, darkened even more through a polarizer, it took your breath away ! The wind was blowing very strong, but nearly died off for about 2 minutes while I took this shot -- I don't think it ever went away again the rest of the day, so sometimes you are lucky !

We spent the next day looking for some out-of-the-way stone arches in and around Arches National Park, including this one of Rainbow Arch (to be posted). We then spent some time in Arches before hiking to Delicate Arch, a shot that I had never taken on a previous trip. The number of people on the top of that mountain was pretty wild, most of them totally oblivious to those people who wanted to photograph the arch. Thankfully there was a park ranger present who put some sanity in the situation close to sunset ! Even though it was pure luck he was there at that time, it was much appreciated !

That was it for this trip. A wonderful place to visit even though this time the weather did not entirely cooperate.

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