Enough Already with the Rain!
Today started out like too many other days on this trip. It's raining. It has rained at every destination except Dinosaur National Monument, and it has rained at least once during every week of the trip. It rained in most areas for several days before we even arrived. But then it added insult to injury by raining while we were there. It rained 3 days at Farmington, 1 day at Salt Lake City, 1 day at Green River and 1 day in Moab (with 2 more predicted later this week). In fact, we have run out of places to go to escape the rain. I think we're getting the remnants of Hurricane Patricia. It's going to rain for two days with temperatures in the 20's at Capitol Reef. It's going to rain for two days at Grand Staircase. It's going to rain two days in Bryce. It's going to rain 3 days in Farmington. It's going to rain 2 days in Zion. And, it's going to rain 3 days here in Moab. Not only are we getting rain later in the week, but the back roads we planned to travel are only getting muddier. We've decided to stay in Moab for now because we have paved roads to most of our destinations, and if we decide to leave early, we only have 30 miles to jump on I-70 to come home.
Clearing skies and scattered thunderstorms were forecast for this afternoon, so we decided to drive up to Dead Horse State Park. The last time we were here, a thunderstorm blew through while we were up on the plateau, and we got great images. We were hoping for a repeat.
We stopped at Seven Mile Canyon
on the way to Dead Horse
to check out two more panels of petroglyphs. The "TV Sheep"
were pretty cool. They're called the TV Sheep because the bodies of the sheep are square, like an old-style TV. Intestine Man was
less interesting. The petroglyph appears to show a person with his/her intestines outlined in the petroglyph. Intestine Man was chipped
into light sandstone, so it was also hard to photograph.
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| TV Sheep | Intestine Man |
We continued the drive to Dead Horse, but it was obvious there would be no storm on the plateau today. Now that we wanted a storm, the skies were blue. We shot briefly around the Visitor Center before continuing on to Dead Horse Point. We shared the parking lot with a crew from HBO. They are filming an HBO Series in the Moab area. We ate our sack lunch and shot briefly around Dead Horse Point, but the lighting was terrible at midday. We decided to skip Canyonlands completely and return to Moab.
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| Looking Back Toward Seven Mile Canyon | Folding | Dead Horse Point |
Look What We Found
Yesterday, I noticed a spot I wanted to photograph below the La Sal Mountain Overlook. Between the La Sal Mountain Overlook and
the La Sal Mountains was a huge expanse of slickrock. Beyond the slickrock were petrified sand dunes that could make a good foreground
for shooting the La Sals at sunset. Carol wasn't interested in hiking down to the slickrock, so I set off on my own. As soon as I reached
the main wash, I discovered a huge pool that reflected the La Sals perfectly. I sent a message to Carol, and she decided to join me.
I continued exploring the slickrock while Carol shot the pool and then wandered around the wash. Unfortunately, the sun dropped below a
ridge after only about 20 minutes and our warm sunset light was gone. We both saw a formation we wanted to photograph, but we ran out
of time before we could set the shot set up. We'll try to circle back to get it later in the week.
We were hiking back up to the Explorer when we saw the light of the rising moon begin to peek over a ridge. The moon had just cleared the ridge when we reached the Explorer and got set up to shoot. It was a festive atmosphere as other families sat in camp chairs or on the tailgate of their pickups and watched the moon rise. Moonrise was just after sunset, so the sky had the soft blue to light pink gradation. It was a beautiful night and the moon put on quite a show.
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