Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

First Light, Capitol Reef

November 19, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

First dawn light on the high ridges and domes at Capitol Reef National Park, Utah

Before dawn we drove across Capitol Reef National Park to the east, with a plan to head down the rural road that goes south on the park’s east side. We were hoping for interesting dawn light, but we weren’t quite ready for it when it arrived just after we exited the park and arrived at our intersection. The sun wasn’t up yet, but we could see a light show about to develop, with interesting light likely to strike the high ridge to the west and fantastic clouds appearing in the sky.

We quickly found a spot with an open view on much of the surrounding terrain, left the main “road,” grabbed camera gear and headed off to photograph. Within moment the first real light hit these domes and ridges to our west and turned the sky slightly pink. The formations were a good distance away, so I worked quickly with a long lens — and this light diminished within moments.

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Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Canyon Country Gulch, Evening

November 19, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening light in a gulch among red rock hills.

I can credit a knee injury for this photograph. Several days earlier I had been photographing in a slot canyon far from this location. As often is the case, there was a lot of the typical thick, slimy mud in the bottom of the canyon, although the tracks of other visitors had created a drier and less slippery path around the worst of it. However, at one point my attention strayed from the path (as it almost always does when I’m looking for photographs!) and one foot missed the trail and landed in a bit of sloping mud. This mud may just be the most slippery surface on the planet, and my foot immediately slipped few feed toward the bottom of the mud and a pool before I managed to arrest the slide with my other leg — in the process putting way too much lateral stress on my knee. At the time it didn’t hurt much, but fast-forward to perhaps five days later and…

… as we headed down a gully to toward another big canyon the knee started to act up, and at a point where the rest of the group dropped down into the narrower portion of this canyon my knee said, “No.” I let the group go on, explored a bit in the flatlands above the canyon, walked out, and went elsewhere to photograph. In the evening I returned to camp before the rest of the group and I had some time to kill before sundown, so I wandered off from camp into some beautiful nearby red rock and spend an hour quietly photographing in the evening light, where I found this little gulch with a lone cottonwood tree at its far end.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Cottonwood Grove and Pink Hills, Autumn

November 18, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A grove of cottonwood trees with autumn foliage in front of pink hills near Capitol Reef National Park

This is essentially a photograph of nowhere in particular. We had traveled down a long gravel road on the east side of Capitol Reef, climbed up on top of the ridge in the south part of the park, hiked and photographed a bit, and were heading back to our camp in Fruita when we just happened to see this grove of trees in a wash along the road.

This is a kind of quintessential Capitol Reef and Utah photograph, or so it seems to me. The cottonwood trees grow anywhere there is a creek or a wash, and they are especially beautiful in the fall when their leaves turn brilliant shades of yellow. Beyond these trees are higher hills of pink material, again so typical of this part of Utah. The hills continue to rise, eventually with a sparse covering of pine and juniper, until they reach the open, eroded sandstone of the highest ridges of Capitol Reef National Park.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Cracked Mud, Canyon Light

November 18, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Reflected red canyon light illuminates cracked mud in a Utah wash

I had thought of titling this photograph “More Mud,” given that it certainly was not the only photograph I made of this subject recently. The group of us — 6 landscape/nature photographers — had set off down into a beautiful canyon, but before we dropped into the deeper section we came across this patch of trying and curling mud… and ended up stopping for a half hour or more to photograph this seemingly mundane subject.

But actually, it turns out that desert mud is often anything but mundane. When it is found in a narrow canyon with red rock walls, the mud takes on the colors of the reflected light and even a bit of the blue color from overhead open sky. In many cases, you might miss this if you were not tuned in to the light and color… but if you do see it, soon such places provide a wild range of colors. A highlight comes from overhead light reflected down into the canyon as it bounces off the red rock and takes on a very warm and red coloration.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

First Light, Capitol Reef

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Canyon Country Gulch, Evening

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Cottonwood Grove and Pink Hills, Autumn

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Cracked Mud, Canyon Light

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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.

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Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.