Trip to Utah – Part 1

I have been putting off working the Utah images for a while and I have finally decided to finish working on them this weekend. I decided to divide the photos to two parts – the first part is primarily Arches National Park and the second part is Canyonlands National Park. Although we spent about three full days in Utah, the weather did not cooperate half of the time, so we tried to shoot as much as we could while it lasted. On top of that, as I have indicated before, I lost about 8 gigs of photos from the last two days. Hope you enjoy these!

I was initially planning to go through I-70 directly to Grand Junction and stay overnight. After a rock fell on the highway and destroyed a portion of it, we detoured through highway 287. On the way to Grand Junction, we stopped at a local farm to take some pictures of the cows early in the morning:

This one looked at me, wondering what I was up to:

Next, we headed straight to Arches. The park was flooded with rain from a couple of days before, so there were plenty of interesting pools in the area:

All clouds disappeared from the sky and we were just left with the blue sky:

Our last hike of the day was Delicate Arch. Although I posted some pictures of the arch right here, here is a panoramic version of the arch:

We stayed at the arch for a while and ended up leaving at night. When we came to the parking lot, the sky was very clear and full of beautiful stars. I spotted Orion and took a shot:

We decided to come back to the Arches next day to photograph the Window Arch at sunrise. As the sun started appearing in the horizon, I turned back and snapped a picture:

It is an HDR shot that I colorized in Photoshop, because the ground looked very pale.

Sunrise at the Window Arch was not what I expected. The clouds were on the other side and the sky was plain blue again…I was really hoping to get some clouds in the sky!

Nevertheless, I still went ahead and got a shot of the Turret Arch through the Window Arch:

Clouds moved in very quickly and it was supposed to rain in the evening. We took a long hike in the park and snapped some shots here and there:

The weather then started to get worse. The next two days were just horrible, but we had no idea what was awaiting us, even after we saw the “sign” :)

Stay tuned for Part 2 and a surprise at the Canyonlands!

All of the above images (except the first two) were shot with Nikon D700 and Nikon 16-35mm VR lens.