Our drive through the Rocky Mountains to Utah was for the most part, rainy. However, as the desert grew closer, the skies turned more blue and the thermometer rose to meet us. Western Colorado surprised us with fascinating rock formations and the gradual appearance of a desert climate.  Although I have no photos as proof (I was driving) Glenwood Canyon along Interstate 70 was truly one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. It was our first introduction to tall, red canyon walls, carved by the Colorado river, which would now follow much of our journey through Utah and into Arizona.

Utah turned from the pale colors that are usually pictured in a desert to red hues as we turned south from Interstate 70 towards Moab. The closer we grew to Moab, it seemed the more red and grandiose the rocks turned until we found ourselves surrounded by what seemed to be almost another world.

Bob Atkins gives this reason in a comment on this article:

You should get significantly better results by color balancing a RAW file than by color balancing a JPEG. The reason is that the RAW file has all of the original color information, while the JPEG file has thrown away some of it.

To take an extreme example. Suppose you shot indoors under tungsten light but you had the camera set to daylight white balance. If you write a JPEG you'll be throwing away a lot of the color information information and you'll end up with a red/yellow looking image. You can't get that lost info back. However in the RAW file, all the color data for all the channels is there and you can recover the image.

To me, it is defenitely worth the effort of post-processing and the expense of extra storage. I am interested in learning more about DNG, which promises to reduce file sizes.