Red Rock and Autumn Color. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Early autumn color at the base of Zion Naitonal Park cliffs.
Back in Autumn of 2012 I had an unusual opportunity to spend a total of roughly a month photographing in the red rock country of Southern Utah. I was there early in the month for a couple weeks, and I returned in near the end of the month with photographer friends. On that second visit we concentrated on Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and on Capitol Reef and Zion National Park. We visited Zion twice — as we entered the state and again as our trip concluded and we started back to California.
From my autumn visits to this part of Utah I started to learned a few things about how fall color evolves there, though my knowledge is far from complete. The first thing I learned is that the aspens change color earlier than in California — more like late September than early October. (I learned this the hard way, by showing up a bit too late to photograph peak aspen color.) The color in the red rock canyons seems to come later, and we had plenty of it to photograph in the second half of the month. When we arrived in Zion National Park at the end of the month interesting color was showing up at higher elevations, but I think we were catching only the very beginning of the color in Zion Canyon. That’s where I made this photograph, with an early riot of color at the base of the ubiquitous red rock cliffs.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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