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I confess that I like being in the position of having my employer tell me that I must take a vacation, or lose the time. Who wouldn't? Well, the end of the year was imminent, and so I merged this forced vacation with the holidays and weekends. The result? Nine days on the road. Where to go? If, like me, you're already tired of Colorado's long winter, you tend to head south. I found a friend of like mind, and off we went.
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The Mittens at dawn.
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We planned to take it easy, doing whatever we liked. We left Denver at about 8:30 am Saturday, and took I-25 through Walsenburg, over La Veta Pass, past the Cumbres & Toltec Scenic Railway (a classic shot in the fall, but that's another story) and on over La Manga Pass. We wasted no time, pulling into Farmington near sunset, and Shiprock at dusk. We spent our first night in Kayenta, Arizona. After Ten hours on the road, out came the Stoli.
Kayenta has a McDonalds, and is well inside the Navajo Nation, which comprises most of northeastern Arizona. It's a great place to stay if you are going to shoot Monument Valley at dawn – which is just what we did – along with the DP (Director of Photography) of Wheel of Fortune, who was taking HDTV footage to use as the contestants backdrop during a future Arizona-featured gameshow. He was there with a Sedona photographer he'd hired (they just got done shooting Sedona), because a local knows what to shoot and when it looks best. Also accompanying them was a tourguide from Sacred Monument Gallery & Tours. This Navajo guide was also a photographer, and he showed off a portfolio: Great shots of Indians in native dress at wonderful locations. Some of the lighting was so nice that it could have been studio work.
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Navajo made jewelry.
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After the chilly dawn wind blowing at Monument Valley – and hitting the McDonalds – we set our sights on Navajo National Monument. This was a bit of a disappointment: I wanted to try and take a nice photograph of Betatakin, after I saw a picture of it taken in 1930 by Laura Gilpin (see James L. Enearts great book "Land, Sky, and all that is Within"). From the Navajo NM website, I believed the Betatakin would have been just a few hour's walk. Alas, it was closed for the season.
Onward - through Tuba City and out of the high desert to Wupatki National Monument and Sunset Crater Volcano, just outside of Flagstaff. Wupatki is somewhat interesting; I became intrigued by Wukoki ruin, built on a rock in the middle of a vast plain (see the picture, above). Dusk arrived, and we spent our second night in Flagstaff.
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Foreground interest at
the Grand Canyon
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We spent the next two nights at our main destination, Sedona. It was from here that we took side trips to Montezuma Castle, Tuzigoot, and Jerome. In a Sedona photography gallery I saw Palatki ruin for the first time, and knew I wanted to try and capture that. Eventually, we took unexceptional pictures of both Palatki and Honanki ruins, which are located just west of Sedona. If you go, watch out for the Pink Jeep Tours.
Days walking around Sedona inevitably resulted in solicitations for timeshare properties of some sort or another. And the nights were punctuated by overpriced margaritas, xanax, hot tubs, and continuing the book-on-tape of Greg Bear's very weird Blood Music. Yes, no matter how hard I tried, the chance that I would become psychologically scarred always seemed to coincide with a solstice.
While Sedona's winter temperatures were wonderful, it was time to leave and begin heading north . . . to the Grand Canyon. There, it's entirely possible that you could have great light during sunset and sunrise, but on this Christmas Eve, the weather didn't participate. A cold front was coming in...it was challenging enough just to brave the wind to check out the views from all of the pull-outs on the South Rim. Despite the chill air, the flow of visitors was non-stop, and interestingly, many of these visitors foreigners (mostly appearing to be Japanese). Indeed, if it was this crowded on Christmas Eve, I can't imagine what the National Park is like other times of the year (I will soon find out, though, as I'm planning on doing a rim-to-rim hike there next fall).
Despite another weird evening in the hotel hot-tub – this time with too-cool ("Uh, ...I don't really play computer games...") Vietnamese kids from LA – we made plans to shoot the canyon at dawn. Instead, we were greeted the next morning by cloud cover and rain. Snow and fog were the rule as we finally set out, occasionally checking an overlook, where the canyon edge simply dropped off into a fog-filled void.
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Our Antelope Canyon Guide.
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We were going north, and planned to blow-off Antelope Canyon and make Zion National Park by nightfall. But, the weather improved, and it looked like we could roll into Page, Arizona at about noon . . . which they say is the best time to shoot Antelope (pun intended). But would it be accessible on Christmas Day? Yes! After a small wait, we were greeted by a tourguide, one Dalvin Etsitty, who was just returning with a small group of young people (who happened to be, uh, ...Japanese). Antelope Canyon has been called a photographic cliché, but nonetheless I paid the $15 per-person fee for the hour tour, plus the $5 Navajo Reservation Parks & Recreation pass (or some such thing), for myself and my friend, and off we went: South, up a sandy wash for a 10 or 15 minute drive.
Our guide dropped us off, and said that he'd be back in an hour. We were the only people there! And what a fascinating experience! I took my tripod and began shooting for maximum depth-of-field. It was a cloudy day, and at f/22 and ISO 100, I was doing 15- to 30-second shots. I soon changed the speed to 200 for faster exposures to move things along; I knew that other photographers would kill to have Antelope to themselves. I walked up the 200-yard length of Antelope, then returned (wow! ...a whole other view!). As I returned to the entrance, new voices were heard, and then a flute.
The flute sounded at once mystical, southwestern, and new-agey; and as I turned around a bend I discovered that it was being played by our Navajo guide. He had returned with two new visitors, who had come in for a quick look. While preparing to leave, our guide told us a bit about his culture, and sang us a traditional Navajo tune, which resonated in the amazing acoustics of the canyon. Christmas in Antelope . . . with my friend, an Indian, and two Muslims. It was worth the money.
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Horseshoe Bend Near Page, Arizona.
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Page Arizona is close to several photographic sites, not the least of which is Horseshoe Bend, a couple of miles below the Glen Canyon Dam. The guide at Antelope told me about this, but it took a waitress at Denny's (apparently the only place open on Christmas!) to send us the right way. If you are shooting at 17mm, you'll want to note that you shouldn't be framing the shot while looking through the viewfinder. Yes, this is yet another place where you can fall and die a spectacular death.
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Outside Bryce NP.
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We got out of Arizona and made it to Zion that evening, but a snowstorm prevented us from exploring it the following morning. After making it up the main canyon in the gathering snowstorm, we left Zion and headed north to Bryce Canyon...where we encountered temperatures well below freezing, wind, and ... two feet of snow: So much snow, in fact, that the most of the road through the park was closed.
While I'm almost always up for dawn photography, not even some early-morning Stolichnaya would have helped us brave the 0°F temperatures we experienced at dawn. It was fine with me to just stay inside, enjoying warm coffee instead. We left Bryce, unwilling to tackle the cold and snow of the park, and we set out north again, slowly winding our way back to Denver, with one last uneventful stop at Capitol Reef NP.
We hadn't completely run out of liquor or money yet, but we saved Kodachrome Basin and Goblin State Parks for some other, hopefully warmer, photo opportunity.
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