The Windows Section
McDonald’s, St. Louis and, the spine of an angry cat, are usually images conjured up from the word “arches”, but Utah is also famous for arches. As a matter of fact, most of us have seen some of Utah’s famous arches. I featured one in my last post about Mesa Arch. People often assume Mesa Arch is at Arches National Park. While it is iconic, and is even located near Moab, UT, it is not part of Arches National Park, it is located in Canyonlands National Park. Most people, however, have seen images of Arches’ iconic arch, Delicate Arch or even Double Arch, featured in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. The movie Thelma and Louise also filmed on location at Arches National Park and the scenes form the movie that depicted the Grand Canyon as the setting were actually filmed in Canyonlands National Park. Utah is home to many iconic movie sets, particularly Kane County, where we stayed while visiting Zion National Park. Kanab, the county seat hosted over 100 movies and TV series in the area, including the Lone Ranger, how the West was Won, and the Six Million Dollar Man.
Double Arch
We received some strong advice to get out early, rest during the mid-day, and go back out in the late afternoon in Utah. Most of that advice was geared towards the temperatures, but it applied to photography as well. By 10:00 AM, we found the light so harsh that the images we captured were not very good. Again, this has reinforced the sad truth to me that when it comes to landscape photography, the early bird gets the worm. Our plans hit their first real weather-related adjustments while we were in Moab. We had hoped to hike to ancient ruins in Canyonlands National Park, but the threat of afternoon strong thunderstorms made an already tricky hike down a slickrock trail unwise. We had also hoped to catch the famous sunset at Delicate Arch, as well, but the threat of flash flooding nixed that from our schedule as well. The happy part of those disappointments is that we still have some first time experiences awaiting us at those parks.
The second piece of good news is that a lot of people miss wonderful sunsets at Balanced rock because they are at Delicate Arch. The Delicate Arch sunset often receives complaints from photographers during the busy season because it is crowded and people almost always climb up to the arch itself when sunset is reaching its, pinnacle, disturbing the photographers’ shots. There were no crowds at Balanced Rock. We were actually the only ones parked there until the end.
Pothole Arch
Since we really never hiked to Delicate Arch, we still wanted to grab a couple of photos before we left, even if they were distant and wide angle so we rose the next morning and hit the Delicate Arch Overlook as well as took the brief hike to the Ute petroglyphs at Wolf Ranch before heading south to tour more of Utah’s amazing rocks.
Delicate Arch
Balanced Rock
Ute Petroglyph
