Our final day. We had a list of the shots we had missed during the week and had designed our day around the afternoon hours that the shots required.
We slept in and then started prepping to leave tomorrow. We needed to dump all our tanks and check all our levels. By the time we were done, we had missed breakfast. We grilled burgers for lunch as we watched the clouds roll in. They were high cirrus clouds and looked very promising for our shots. By the time we had finished, the clouds had thickened, and it wasn't looking so promising.
We drove up to the Grotto where we had shot on Thursday. The trees around the picnic area were still the best in the main canyon, but they didn't have the sparkle of Thursday. The high clouds were filtering the sun and making the light much cooler. We soon wished that we had returned to this area earlier in the week.
Our next stop was Pine Canyon, where we had been seeing bright yellow cottonwoods snaking up the canyon every time we drove the road up to the tunnel. Each time, we chose to put off shooting this area for later in the week. When we reached the bottom of the canyon, I realized the sun had already dropped behind the ridge, and the trees wouldn't be lit. We continued up the road, but each group of trees was in the shade by the time we could shoot them. Next time we're here for fall color, we need to make it a priority to hike up Pine Canyon. The cottonwoods lining the canyon were amazing, and we missed a great opportunity this time.
It was obvious the light was deteriorating, so we dropped our idea of shooting in the slickrock area above the tunnel. We drove down to the Visitor Center, so Carol could adopt her bighorn. I had donated to the program on Tuesday, and we had seen bighorn sheep on every trip into the slickrock area. It seemed appropriate to support the program, since we had been so fortunate to see and photograph so many bighorn sheep on our trip. Carol named her adopted bighorn sheep, Ronan, after her great nephew.
Our evening was spent taking showers and getting everything packed up to leave tomorrow morning. We've
got about a twelve hour drive ahead of us, so we're hoping to get a fairly early start.
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