My memory is, in a word, unreliable. I can remember lyrics from songs that I haven’t heard for 20 years, but can forget that entire conversations ever happened. I can remember an insignificant fact someone told me about their life years before, but forget that I’ve already told them a story multiple times. To combat these inconsistent gaps in my recollection of things, I’ve tried to learn what helps and what doesn’t.
Conveniently, I’m a very visual person, so photographs go a long way towards serving as bookmarks for different events and experiences in my life. When travelling, the photos I take help me to remember what was happening at the time I pressed the shutter and perhaps what I was thinking or feeling in the moment. There’s a limit to the capabilities of these visual bookmarks though, so I realized early on when I started travelling that I wanted something more to help me remember the different experiences I was having. The solution that I found for this is jotting down notes or mini journal entries to help me remember the people I met, the experiences I had, and the different thoughts that went through my mind while travelling.
The reason I bring this up is because I kept a fairly detailed journal during the 37-day photography road trip that I took in early summer of 2019. After driving west across the United States via Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, I left Arches National Park to spend a night at nearby Dead Horse Point outside of Moab, Utah. The journal entry from that day describes my reaction to walking to the edge of a cliff at Dead Horse Point. The cliff, situated on the edge of a mesa, overlooks a canyon through which the Colorado River flows. With many other natural landscapes that I see for the first time, I make an effort to describe details in my notes about the weather conditions and the scene in front of me, as well as my reactions to them.
However, I can see from looking back at my notes that when describing my reaction to standing on the precipice of Dead Horse Point, peering down at the Colorado River snaking its way around towering red cliffs 2,000 feet below me, I took a different, less eloquent approach to documenting my first impression: “Holy shit biscuits.”
The view from Dead Horse Point is nothing short of breathtaking. It was what I had imagined the Grand Canyon would look like, at least until I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time later that week. To the southeast of the overlook I could see the La Sal mountains 25 miles into the distance as they ducked in and out of passing rainstorms. To the southwest, the Colorado River curved itself around a dramatic gooseneck before flowing along the eastern side of Canyonlands National Park in the distance. Between the overlook and those distant points along the horizon, the view was stacked with layers of mesas and sedimentary red rock cliffs that had been carved by years of erosion.
After an amount of time that I frankly couldn’t begin to guess, I was broken out of my awe-struck trance by the voice of an older man who had just approached the overlook with two companions. Armed with his cell phone and a voice like a foghorn, the man began making a series of contradicting predictions about the upcoming sunset. To summarize, it was going to be somewhere between a fiery explosion or color and a drab disappointment. In those same moments, I made an equally bold prediction to myself that I was going to grab a few quick photos and then leave the area where he was as quickly as possible and explore other parts of the nearby cliff. Amazingly, my prediction was spot-on.
I endured the presence of Captain Foghorn for a few more minutes before packing up my gear and walking away from the main overlook and along the rim of the plateau. He bragged about how he had figured out how to turn YouTube videos into MP3 files and put 1,000 of them onto his phone, but he never revealed why he thought it was a good idea to play those songs at the same volume as his face megaphone in the rocky landscape of Dead Horse Point that allowed sound to travel so easily.
I tried to escape to the nearby cliffs, the edges of which were spotted with vegetation, providing ample foreground elements to complement the dramatic views beyond. After playing around with a few compositions and foreground, I chose a twisted juniper tree to place in the foreground of my frame. I had found over the past few days that there was something I loved about the appearance of Utah junipers, as I had already placed them in a fair number of photos up to that point.
Confirming half of Sergeant Speakerbox’s prediction, a colorful sunset never materialized. However, the distant passing rainstorms dancing across the landscape provided plenty of opportunities for photography. Satisfied with the photos I had captured, I made my way back to camp just as the passing rain storms reached my location. The forecast looked rainy for the remainder of the night, so choosing to forego any chance of night photography in favor of sleep, I retreated to my sleeping bag in preparation for sunrise, closing my eyes to the sound of rain falling on my tent.
The next morning brought clear skies overhead, but long cloud banks that hovered over the horizons over Dead Horse Point. I had the view to myself, so I made my way towards the edge of the mesa, opting for a location at the main overlook that would provide me with as many different areas of the canyon below as possible. Because of the cloud banks on the horizon, a fiery-skied sunrise was unlikely. However, there was already a beautiful soft light on the canyon, and I knew that if those clouds on the horizon began to break up and allow the early morning sunlight to push through, there was a great chance for golden light to dapple the canyon walls.
In anticipation, I attached my telephoto lens to my camera and started playing around with the different compositional shapes that the landscape provided. Eventually, I saw a golden glow wash across what I now know to be The Needles District in Canyonlands National Park over 25 miles to the south, signaling that the show was soon to begin.
About ten minutes later, the light reached the tops of the canyon walls 5 miles to my southeast behind the iconic gooseneck curve in the Colorado River. In the half hour that followed, the light danced freely across the landscape as shafts of sunbeams burst through the clouds to the northeast, spotlighting one canyon wall and plateau after another in an impressive glow. I can’t even begin to describe how happy I was that Emperor Boomvoice wasn’t there to share the views with me.
After an hour of shooting, the morning light grew harsh enough that I decided it was time to pack up and get on the road. I made my way back to camp, shook the remnants of the previous night’s rain storms off of my tent, and loaded up my car in preparation for my drive towards southern Utah, at the time completely unaware that the morning light over Dead Horse Point that I had just witnessed wouldn’t even be the best views or photographic conditions I experienced that week. Holy shit biscuits indeed.
Next stop: Bryce Canyon National Park.