The next cycle home is in the early planning stages and I thought you'd like to get some details. This year I'll be leaving early as my asthma is already getting much worse. Also, last year I didn't allow enough time for my lungs to heal and I have suffered ever since my return. So I'm planning more like 3 months this year and to leave in early March with a return around June 1. My plan this year is to skip all of southern California and to start somewhere around Julia Pfeiffer Burns SP (south of Big Sur) and slowly make my way up the coast to the Canadian border. I'll spend a few days around San Francisco, visiting some friends and trying to get a good set of images from the Golden Gate and elsewhere. That town is really hard to deal with as its almost impossible to keep people from stealing things from the truck and finding a place to crash at night. 2 years ago I was forced to drive south to Half Moon Bay and sleep in a shopping center to feel safe. Hopefully I can find a better place to overnight this time so I can really concentrate on getting some super shots. I also want to spend time in Crater Lake and other national parks along the coastal range plus maybe get some nice images around Seattle. Then I hope to travel east and hit Glacier NP along with Yellowstone before heading south and back to Albuquerque. I know that snow is especially a problem in Glacier so I may not be able to get much done there but we'll see. Yellowstone is also problematic but I'm hopeful enough will be accessible to make the trip worthwhile. As always, I'll adjust my plans as conditions dictate and get as many images as I can. This year I want to take "timeouts" along the way where I can organize my images and get some downtime to rest. Last year I was overwhelmed with all the personal issues and spent far too much time driving back and forth to Albuquerque to fix them. This put a lot of excess miles on the truck and on me personally. Hopefully not this year. I just want to get my gear and head out, not to return until my travels are over. I'll keep my fingers crossed that's what happens this time around.
Natural Bridges National Park
This is one of those hidden gems that few people know about. It's in the southeast corner of Utah and well worth the drive to see it. Not very big, and only a few standout features but WOW, are they something to see. Unlike the sandstone arches found in Arches NP, these arches are due exclusively to water erosion of hard rock. There's a river (dry most of the time) running through the park and these huge bridges are a direct result of the swirling water slowly eating away the rock until it collapses. What's really nice is you can, if you have the legs, walk down into the river bed and see the rock features up close. There's a very small staff, just a few rangers, and not a lot of visitors so you get the whole place to yourself most of the time. It's definitely worth the drive and a day to see these amazing features.
This is Sipapu Bridge and the surrounding area. The bridge itself isn't obvious but can be seen near the center-right (about 1/3 from the right edge) as an opening in the rock face. Don't feel bad if you can't see it ... I stood at the overlook for a long time trying to find it until someone pointed it out to me. It tends to blend in with the surrounding rock. The big problem is they put the overlook high above the river, on a bluff that's at least a mile from the arch. Not the best place but I understand their reasoning for doing it that way. There's a broad, flat area below the overlook that get's you much closer to the canyon (right on the edge in fact) but you have to negotiate a dry riverbed and walk about a mile to get there. I parked at the picnic area below the overlook and walked down hill until I got to a small bridge over a wash. Get into the wash and walk toward the canyon. You'll see some warn paths off to the right, across the crust, which you should follow. Eventually you emerge onto the flat and then you simply walk along the canyon edge until directly below the overlook. That's where I took this panorama. As always, I set up early and took several sequences as the sun set, then selected the best once I was back on the computer. There are 90 images in this pano, consisting of 5 images per frame. I ran them through Photomatix using the batch processor, adjusting the white and black levels along with strength to get the overall look I wanted. Photoshop was used to create the panorama and I used Lightroom to finish. There were just enough clouds to get an interesting sunset and the canyon speaks for itself. This is all water erosion and it took millions of years to get this far. There are 2 additional bridges, just as interesting, and maybe I'll show them in the future.
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| Sipapu Bridge - 24mm,f/18,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0 |
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