On our excursion to Point Sublime in Grand Canyon National Park, we unfortunately arrived in the worst part of the day - it was nearly noon.  Plus it was a very hazy day.  And while the view was, for lack of a better word, sublime, and the clouds were offering a dance of sunlight across the landscape, the conditions were not exceptional for photography.  This was not going to be one of those instances where one could simply pick up the camera and make knock-out images, and we could not wait until sunset to make photographs.  So, after waking around the point a while and examining what was being offered to me, I decided that I was going to be very intentional with my image making, and would develop each image I made from Point Sublime to completion (read: to print).  In some ways it was a test of how discriminating I could be if I tried to hold myself to the highest standards possible.  I wound up making three images.

While at Snow Canyon we had to figure out the very last part of our trip.  We had an extra day on the schedule because we’d moved the two nights of camping and day trip to Yant Flat up in the schedule, so now there was a gap to be filled.  I tossed out doing Yant Flat again, or Cathedral Gorge in Nevada again, or stopping by the Alvord Desert in Oregon.  None of those options seemed quite right.  Then Ann said, “What if we headed the other direction, towards California?  Death Valley?”  I replied, “No, I’d like to do more than just a day there.”  “Well what about Yosemite?  Do you think the Tioga Road is still open?”  We checked on the internet and it was.  Our route home was settled.  

We took our time upon arriving at Snow Canyon because we had plenty of time there, right?  We slowly checked out potential photo locations on the drive in, checked into our campsite, took showers, and had a late lunch/early dinner.  We even took an exploratory hike, without our camera backpacks to check out a potential morning photo location.  All was going fine until I started feeling aches in my joints. . . . Not again!

About 6 months before our trip, I got an e-mail from Ann asking, “Have you ever heard of Candyland?”  She’d been sending me possible locations to stop at on our trip and, at first, I thought this was just another one that we’d check out, put on a list and not think much more about once we’d given it a good look.  But that night as I was making dinner, Ann pulled up the website where she’d seen images and I realized that this place was a bit different.  “Where is it?”  “Apparently somewhere near St. George, Utah.”  “We should check it out.”

The next morning I woke with excitement flowing through my veins.  We had decided that, while on our way to Fire Point, we would take the long down-and-back detour to Point Sublime.  And while the main road to Fire Point was a fairly good Forest Service road, the road to Point Sublime wasn’t - the Kanabownits Road is listed as a 4WD road on the maps, even worse than a high clearance road, and we were warned that it lived up to its rating. I was going to get to do some technical driving!  Just not where we’d planned.

It pretty much rained all night.  Often hard.  We checked the forecast the next morning;  nothing had changed - rain off and on for a couple of days.  Time to implement the plan!  The nice thing about southern Utah is that there is so much to see and visit.  The bad part was that so many of the places we really wanted to go to entailed going off-road, and that just wasn’t an option.  So we decided to make a radical decision, to go to a place we hadn’t even considered going to for this trip (so didn’t even have the paper maps for) - head to Arizona and the north rim of the Grand Canyon! 

Spending the night hooked up to shore power did the trick.  We woke up the next morning with a set of fully charged house batteries.  The question then became what to do with the free day we had before we had to be back to the shop for the alternator replacement?  Given the rains we had, most of the locations we were hoping to visit in Capitol Reef were either closed, or would be muddy messes.  We decided to call Capitol Reef a bust and to make up for the lost repair day by heading back to the Boulder area to see what we could cobble together.

As planned, we were up and at it again in Goblin Valley State park early the next morning.  And while the morning light was not as spectacular as the previous evening’s, it was a good morning of photography!

Our morning photographing the aspens of the Pando Forest had been superb.  It was time to start the second phase of our trip, which would take us to the more desert-like environs to places we’ve been to before, places we haven’t, and new routes in-between.  In our planning, this was the part of the trip where we were supposed to stay in one general location for at least a couple of nights at a time so that we could explore an area deeper before moving on.  Well, that was the concept at least! The best-laid plans of mice and men . . . .

It was dark the next morning when we got up and, given that we’d camped at an even higher 9,500 feet elevation, very cold.  After donning our long johns and brewing a pot of coffee to help warm us up, we made the short drive over to where we’d hoped to photograph in the morning.  Clouds had started rolling in, so we had a mix of cloud cover and starry skies waiting for us as we set up for our first photographs of the morning.  Even then, we had to wait around a bit as the sun approached the horizon before we could make our first images of the day. 

After a full month on the road, we’ve finally made it back!  It was a strange feeling to drive over the Willamette Pass and head towards home given that “home” had been Beast for the previous thirty days.  I liken it to my first trips back from Iraq, where everything seemed both familiar and alien at the same time.  We got back on Saturday afternoon and by Sunday both Ann and I asked each other, “Can we just take off and get back on the road?”  

WARNING!  If you’re the type of person who gets queasy looking at injured body parts, you should seriously consider not continuing and, instead, wait for the next blog post.  Really, you should.  Now, if you’re the kind of person who is likely to say, “Heck, that’s nothing, I was hoping to see a compound fracture with the bone sticking out of the skin!” then you might as well read on.  You’ve been warned.

As we mentioned quite a while back, our strategy this year has been to take a series of long-weekend trips throughout the year so we could save up for one, month-long, grand adventure in the Fall.  Well, Fall is coming and it’s time to start spilling the beans about what is going to be our adventure for the months of September and October.  What better way to start than by discussing where in the world we’ve decided to go - subject to change of course!