Arriving into Las Vegas International Airport, I felt like I had come to the wrong place. Loud, frenetic, and crowded, this certainly wasn’t what I had in mind the night before. The whole process of getting through the airport, checking out a rental car, and making my way through Las Vegas via the 15 freeway was headache-inducing. But once 20 miles or so out of the city I felt more at peace and could now focus on the journey that lay ahead of me.
Alicia had asked me several days earlier what I was looking forward to the most with this photo trip. I didn’t have to think long to answer her – it was that moment of freedom being in the car driving into Utah with mood inducing music playing through the speakers, watching that road ahead with anticipation and excitement, wondering what lays beyond that next horizon. As the 15 freeway crosses into Arizona for a brief moment before snaking into Utah, it goes through a dramatic narrow canyon carved out by the Virgin river. I think it was driving through this canyon that I had remembered Alicia’s question and had a smile come across my face.
Just outside of St. George is a Welcome Center where I stopped to check on road conditions and confirm an alternate route to Lake Powell that went around Zion National Park. The friendly old man at the counter told me it was 168 (?) miles from here to Page, AZ going the southern route, avoiding the traffic and slow winding road of Zion. That sounded like a very friendly number to me. I had no need to hurry to make it to Lake Powell in time for some dreamt-about sunset pictures. I gave Alicia a call to tell her that I was in Utah, and as I left that message for her on our home answering machine I could hear the excitement in my own voice as I told her how good it felt to finally be here.
I think I started planning this trip in January. I originally thought I’d go back to Death Valley and perhaps as far as Lone Pine. But after studying maps of the Southwest and looking up places online, I discovered that there were several “must have” photo locations all within a few miles of each other. Antelope Canyon (where beams of light come through sandstone rocks), Horseshoe Bend (perhaps the most dramatic single location on the Colorado River), and Lake Powell itself are all within 15 minutes of each other with the town of Page conveniently located in the center of them. This was going to be my destination, and I had a long wait for it to arrive.
Driving into the small town of Hurricane (were there ever violent storms here?) I had lovely flashbacks to driving to Zion in years past. But this time I took a right turn onto highway 9 to take the southern route over to Kanab and then to Lake Powell. I was now in new territory. It’s an interesting drive heading east. To your left are the red buttes of Utah, red rocks at the top with green bases of vegetation, and on the right side of the road is a flat plane that gently slopes up eventually dropping off into the Grand Canyon, about 80 miles to the south.
At the town of Fredonia (if you can call it a town) I was considering making a side trip to the North Rim of the GC (the road sign said 75 miles). But it was a good thing that I checked first with the locals because they told me the visitor center there is still covered with 7 feet of snow and didn’t open until late May.
On through the town of Kanab, taking a right turn onto hwy 9, and an easy drive through southern Utah to my destination. About 15 miles before Page is a visitor center for the Glen Canyon region. A friendly man there gave me maps of the area and I asked him about the road out to Alstrom Point which was were I wanted to shoot sunset pictures on the next evening. He said it was opened and told me where the road started. I had also asked him about hiking to a place called The Wave, another famous photo spot, but you had to put your name on a walk-in list the day before you want to hike it, and they draw names if there are more than 10 people on the list. I put that into consideration for my third day here.
About 2 weeks before this trip I sent an email to a photographer that I had found online who had some wonderful shots around Lake Powell in his portfolio, and I asked him if he’d share with me some of those locations. One of them was a place on the west side of the lake called Lone Rock, and that was where my first stop to take pictures would be. It was perhaps around 5pm when I arrived there (but don’t ask me if that was Utah or Arizona time – I had a hard time keeping it straight) and the sun was still high above the western horizon so I had a little time before the “magic minutes” of light would occur. I got back in the car (or SUV; it was a 4 wheel drive Durango which would prove it’s worth in the coming days) and drove to an overlook of the lake. It was there that I first got a glimpse of how low the water level of the lake was. I would later find out that there’s been a 12 year drought, and the waterline is 50 feet (that’s 50 VERTICLE feet!) below normal. Looking to the south I could see the town of Page where I’d make base camp for the next 2 days. The sun still wasn’t low enough, so I went on into town to check into the Courtyard Marriott, lovely hotel with Southwest décor. I was greeted with a large Fatali print of The Wave in the lobby and I knew I was at the right place.
That evening I took some pictures back at Lone Rock and the photomaking process had begun. Once dark I crossed back over the Colorado River on the 700 foot high bridge and had some dinner at the hotel bar/restaurant. The hotel had wireless internet throughout (even sitting at the bar) and I was able to email pictures as I went to family and friends, and even chatted with my brother and Dad each evening.
Before going to bed that night I asked the bartender (a local from the town of Big Water who humored me by acting impressed when looking at my pictures on the laptop; I’m sure she sees these every day) what time sunrise was, and I was unhappy to hear 5:55 am. My alarm went off at 5:30am and I drove about 4 miles south of Page to a turnoff with a small sign (which I heard was new; this place used to be unmarked) pointing to Horseshoe Bend. A half mile walk takes you to this dramatic overlook where the Colorado River makes a huge horseshoe shaped bend about 800 feel below. There were 2 other photographers there, and I was wishing I had gotten there a few minutes earlier as the sun light was just starting to kiss the edge of the canyon.
I have a photo-blog sited called “Chase the Light” which I borrowed from a song by The Innocence Mission about impressionist painters at Honflouer in the 1800’s. The song is about the wife of a painter who goes out every day to paint this inlet of water that always sparkled with light. She laments “I work all day, you chase the light.” (I wonder if my wife feels that way when I take trips like this.) I thought that “Chase the Light” was the perfect way to describe what happens in photography, but I never fully understood the meaning of that title until this trip when I literally raced against time, chasing the light that was in front of me.
It was a breathtaking site as the light slowly filled the canyon and the river began to glow with the reflection from the rock walls. Shooting this scene with a ND gradient filter was a must. I was glad I had one in my bag. Once the direct sunlight overpowered the ambient light from below the photo op had ended. The whole scene lasted only 15 minutes or so. I think a lot of people don’t realize that in landscape photography you only get a limited amount of minutes in a 24 hour period to capture certain places. This was certainly one of them. The other two photographers left and I sat down on the edge of the cliff to take in the beauty of this place a bit longer.
I was once asked why I liked landscape photography and after thinking about it I said I felt it was a way to give God the glory of his handiwork that He so artistically created. By photographing a scene I hope to share it with someone who might never get to see that location in person. I want to show people how beautiful God’s creation is. Another reason, though, is simply that I enjoy being at a beautiful location so much that I want to remember that feeling by capturing it in a photograph. Much easier said than done, unfortunately.
I left Horseshoe Bend around 7am and went back to my hotel room for a short nap and then out for breakfast at the local Denny’s. And what a Denny’s – it sits right between the highway and the canyon, a few hundred yards down from the 700 ft. high Glen Canyon Damn. After breakfast I went into town to get some water and granola bars for my afternoon tour and the trip I would take that evening.
At 11am I signed in at Antelope Canyon Tours where I joined two other photographers for our 2.5 hour photo tour of the famous slot canyon. Our guide was a Navajo lady (and owner of this tour business) who grew up in the area. She told us how as a child she would go visit her grandfather out in the Monument Valley area, and she could never figure out why all these tourists would come and take pictures of boring rocks. Now she makes her living off of them.
I asked her about how many people did she think would be in the canyon today. “Oh, not many. Maybe 100,” she replied. Yikes! “What’s Many?” I asked. “About 300 in the high season,” she answered. I can’t imagine getting a picture without another body in it if it were that crowded. It was pretty difficult as it was.
The guide did a great job of taking us to the spots where the beams of sunlight come through. The beams only last a few minutes as the sun moves across the sky. She helped us by asking people to move out of the way and even provided some dust (kicking the ground and throwing it in the air) so that we might actually see the beam of light.
It was an awesome place. The 2.5 hours went by very quickly as we walked through the canyon admiring the colors and waves of sand and light. I even found the spot where Fatali took one of his famous photos “Burning Bush” and captured an image there myself.
My goal for the rest of the day was to get out to Alstrom Point, an unpopulated, hard to get to spot on the north side of Lake Powell. I’ve seen some really amazing photos taken from that location and I was praying for a safe drive and an awesome sunset to enhance the canvas for me.
It was divine intervention that I got the free upgrade to the 4-wheel drive Durango, because if I had gotten the 2-wheel drive F150 that I had reserved I probably would have gotten stuck on this crazy road. It started off as a gravel road, then became a dirt road, then became a series of wash-outs, and finally, the last 2 miles was basically driving on rock. Now I know why that place isn’t mentioned in the tourist info. The drive out did go through some lovely meadows of wildflowers, though, and at one point I had thousands of butterflies following me along as I drove. It was a surreal scene.
From the time I left the highway to when I returned to it after dark I never saw another vehicle. It’s a unique experience to be at a place where as far as you can see in any direction you are in complete solitude. At one point I imagined myself at creation, watching God form the rocks and pour water through these canyons. Talk about a great place for meditation! It was hard to leave there, but I wanted to get through all those wash outs again before it got completely dark.
That night I emailed some family and friends, chatted a bit with my Dad, and watched the Giants lose to the Dodgers, all from the hotel bar using my laptop. I thought about getting up early again to take sun rise pictures in the morning but decided I needed the rest for the 5 hour drive back to Vegas the next day.
The next day I left Page around 10am and this time headed to Zion, rather then drive around it like last time. That was an awesome bonus to this trip. Nothing like spending a few hours in Zion canyon, strolling along the Virgin River, having lunch at the Zion Lodge, and getting a few pictures in of Angel’s Landing.
I left Zion around 4pm, and didn’t make it to Las Vegas until 7 because of construction on the 15. Now, here’s what I learned from this experience: never go from the quiet, solitude of the desert to the noisy, frenetic pace of a city like Las Vegas. It was very jarring, to say the least. I called Alicia on the phone as I was leaving the gates of Zion park, and said if it wasn’t for the fact that I was meeting friends from CA there at Vegas I would have been completely happy to head home that night.
