We started the day by checking out the moonset over the campground ridge. I've never been in a campsite where we can take so many shots from the campsite.
Our big outing for today was to check out the arches in the north end of the park near the Fire Wave. We parked in the same parking lot
as the Fire Wave hike, but we dropped into the canyons that took us into the ridges between the road and White Domes. We were looking for Fire Cave,
Thunderstorm Arch
, and Crazy Hill.
Once again, I had the GPS coordinates, so we had a basic idea of where to look. We had no problem finding Fire Cave, but we were a little early and the front
wasn't lit yet. We shot lots of images through the arches of the "cave," but we would have to get the external shots on the way back.
Thunderstorm Arch was just one ridge over from Fire Cave. I was shooting a colorful formation with wonderful wispy cirrus clouds overhead, when I noticed Thunderstorm Arch on the left side of formation. The contrast of the white sandstone with the iron-tinted overlying formations looked even more saturated against the rich blue of the skies. A coven of cirrus witches flew overhead, their robes billowing behind them to complete the scene. After days with no clouds, today was a real treat.
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| Fire Cave | Cirrus Witches | Thunderstorm Arch |
Our final destination was Crazy Hill, a small knoll with insane swirls of colorful sandstone. We had met a hiker on the trail who pointed out Crazy Hill in the distance. What we didn't realize was that he had pointed out the wrong formation. It wasn't until we returned to the motorhome and compared images to the photos in the guidebook that we realized we had missed Crazy Hill. The whole area was filled with crazy colors, but we thought the ones we photographed were a bit subdued because we were shooting into the sun at 11:00; not the best time to see great color. It turned out they were subdued because they weren't Crazy Hill.
By the time we finished shooting at our version of Crazy Hill, we were glad to be heading back to the Explorer. It was getting hot. The cool weather of the early days of our trip were gone, and temperatures were reaching the 90's. We shot the external shots of Fire Cave on our way back to the parking lot and then cranked up the A/C and returned to camp.
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| Fire Cave |
One of the disadvantages of finding good subjects for shooting is that it takes hours to download, back up, and process the images. We worked on images the remainder of the afternoon. It was too hot to be out hiking anyway, but we didn't even try to go back out for sunset. We enjoyed our grilled salmon and au gratin potatoes before returning to work on images again. The disadvantage of shooting HDR images is the amount of time required to process them with our laptop computers. We both need to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional so we can increase the RAM to at least 8 MB. We just don't have enough "horsepower" to process the HDRs and panoramas in a reasonable amount of time.
Today was a good day of shooting.
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