Story Time - Canyonlands
As I noted in the White Sands post, the Army gave me plenty of opportunity to travel. Imagine going to language refresher training in Provo, Utah and your carry-on airline luggage is a 12”x18”x14” white carrying case with a rail-type 4x5 camera, 24 film holders, two lenses, a light meter, and a couple of boxes of film, and your check-in bag is a military duffel bag (the only thing I had that was long enough) with your clothes for two weeks wrapped around your huge wooden tripod with the tripod head removed. That was me. Check out whether it was worth it.
When the military invests a lot of money in training you, they also do a good job of trying to help you retain that training. Which is a good thing given that often they’ve stuck you in a position where you don’t use your language all that often. That’s the military for you. Anyway, when I found out that my bud John (of “life is just a collection of stories” fame) was going to be at the same training session I was, and that his unit would foot the bill for a rental car, my first question to him was, “Hey, Bud, you want to go on a photography excursion during the middle weekend?” John, being the adventurer he is, immediately said, “Hell yeah!”
Now, I hate to say that I’m a conniving little bastard, but my pitch to John really wasn’t as simple as that. John has a background in anthropology and, well, I was pretty sure that if I said that I would be looking to photograph some petroglyphs in southern Utah that it would be an irresistible worm on the hook for him. Then again, I was interested in that (too) and I have some mighty fine petroglyph photos from that trip. So, I guess you might say it was my insurance policy for making sure I didn’t have to rent a car on my own.
John basically made it clear that he was going along for the ride and the one caveat was that I was going to have to do the driving and we couldn’t leave until Saturday morning. So while I went to bed early on Friday night, John had a good time. When I knocked on his door at 6am the next morning, John was freshly showered, though I could tell he hadn’t slept a wink that night. All was confirmed when John crashed about five minutes into the drive south from Provo.
John woke up for good about a half hour north of Arches National Park. We spent half a day photographing, hiking and exploring. At one point, we backtracked at a double pace about 2 miles to grab my camera and tripod (35 lbs of gear) only to turn around and double pace back to the location I realized would be a great photograph once the sun shifted a bit. If I ever get the scanning thing figured out, that is definitely one of the images I’ll post because its a wonderful play of light and stone. Thankfully, John was more than willing to play mule and haul my tripod back to the car.
By the end of the day we were exhausted, so we headed towards Moab. The topic of discussion was simple - neither of us had a lot of discretionary funds so we had a real choice, either we get a hotel for the night, or we eat a good, filling meal and sleep in the car. The vote was unanimous - we’re soldiers, sleeping in a car would be luxurious.
As we entered the north part of Moab (I’m not sure we were even in town yet), there was this big Italian Restaurant. John said, “Italian sounds good.” So I pulled into the parking lot and this older woman, who was standing in a parking space, stepped back and waved us into the spot. As we got out, we hear, “Welcome, come on in and take a seat!” in a lovely German accent. She sounded just like Mutti. John said, “I think I’m going to like this place.”
Once seated we were handed rather thick menus. Flipping quickly, I said, “Italian, German, French, American . . .” Suddenly the German American woman opened up the door to the kitchen and started speaking German to the cooks, who replied in German. John and I locked eyes and at the same time said, “German.” We of course got some German beer to boot because, hey, everyone was speaking German.
After what was a wonderful dinner (and not just because we were starving), we headed over to a gas station to fill up and buy a couple of gallons of water (having drunk the three gallons we’d brought with us), and headed towards and into the north entrance to Canyonlands NP. I don’t know where we pulled over, but it was at some parking area. We figured if a police officer showed up we’d play the poor soldier story and move on. Other than some rustling outside in the middle of the night (I suspect coyotes), there were no interruptions.
As predawn came we shook off our sleep and I drove into Canyonlands, unsure of where we were headed, but figuring that sunrise would have to be interesting. We didn’t really go very far before we came to what I figured would be a nice view.
So I set up my camera and we waited for the sun to pop up over the horizon. The first was a horizontal image made with my wide-angle 90mm lens.
Not wanting to waste a good opportunity, and hoping to make the setting moon a bit more prominent in the image, I decided to make a second image, this time using my longer 210mm lens and doing a vertical to include the moon.
We didn’t hang around long. Sunday was the day we were going to photograph petroglyphs and they were all south of Moab, and a couple required a bit of a hike to get to. I promised John petroglyphs and I was going to give him some. Plus, we were going to have to drive all the way back to Provo because we had class the next morning.
I can’t say the drive home was fun, but the weekend was. I must admit, it’s great having friends like John.