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I got to Shiprock, New Mexico right about sundown, and grabbed a couple of shots of the rock formations.
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Shiprock is on the Navajo Nation, and I saw one fellow standing on top of one of the smaller formations watching the sun go down. Unfortunately, picture was blurry.
I arrived at Arches National Park about midnight, and decided to walk out to Delicate Arch and see if I could get lucky and catch a meteor in a shot with it. I pulled up at the trail and was the only person there (of course, it's midnight!) and noticed a sign about how mountain lions hunt in this territory. I though 'Hmm, they probably hunt at night' and started to reconsider walking out there by myself. Then, 3 college age guys and a girl pulled up and said they were about to walk the trail. I was eating freeze-dried beef stew so I told them I'd catch up with them when I was done.
They ended up with about a 5 minute head start on me, but I caught up pretty quickly because they were having trouble following the trail. If you've never done any desert hiking, it can be confusing because there's no worn-down path from all the people who went before, it's all just rock. What they do is set up small pyramids of rocks (called cairns) every so often, and you just walk from one to the next. So we all moved pretty quick after I caught up and found the trail for them.
(Delicate Arch is such a heavy-use trail that there actually is a worn-down path from the thousands of people who walk it every year, that looks like smoother-than-normal rock. But it's hard to see in the dark if you don't know what you're looking for.)
This was my third time hiking this trail, and the third time it kicked my ass. It's only 3 miles round-trip, but there's a 800 foot (I think) elevation gain up slickrock, almost as steep as a set of stairs. That's an 80 story building. Carrying all my camera gear and light stands on my back. I like this trail a lot because you never see the arch until right at the end, you turn a corner and it's just there, a 50-foot arch right in front of you.
The other guys laid on the rock while I took some pictures:
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Never got that meteor :(
The other guys took off back to the car while I was still shooting, so I had to hike out by myself. I didn't think about that because I've hiked by myself many times, even in the dark. But something about how this whole desert landscape was so different started making me paranoid. I was thinking about mountain lions the whole way back to the car, seeing lion ghosts stalking me out of the corner of my eyes, just waiting for me to drop my guard. Of course, there were none*, and I made it back. Creepiest hike I've done in a while, though.
*none I saw, anyway. I heard once that you're about 100 times more likely to be seen by a mountain lion than to see one. They just watch you pass by from the shadows and most people never know.
I passed by a sunrise shot in Canyonlands I've been planning for months because it was still hours till dawn and I wanted to get down the road.
Continued through the Targhee National Forest and snapped this out the window:
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Then into the town of West Yellowstone, got a room and slept. Woke up early this morning and watched Old Faithful erupt against the stars and meteors, I was the only person out there. Driving back to my motel, I saw the dawn twilight reflecting off the Madison River and had to stop and take a picture:
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That's Orion rising over the hill to the right.
Here's the same scene with a passing car lighting up the trees and fog.
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Alright, I'm getting off the computer and going Yellowstone-ing.
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