Visions of Utah - Page/Antelope Canyon

 

Flowing Sandstone and The Flame, Antelope Canyon

Page/Antelope Canyon

After the austere hush of the desert in Arches and Monument Valley, Page, Arizona was a relative cacophony. 

There’s not much to Page, it just happens to be at the crossroads of the few highways in the areas, and lies in the shadow of the Glen Canyon Dam and a gargantuan Navajo power generating plant. We spent the night at the Page Lake Powell Campground (which was essentially a parking lot with trees.) We pitched our tents in the rocky dirt of a glorified median under the wary eye of a couple Harley-driving bikers. After several days wandering the wilderness, the sojourn into town for Mexican food and some ridiculously large margaritas was almost a shock to the system.

The next day we set out to Antelope Canyon, a slot canyon and Navajo Tribal Parks natural site. Like Monument Valley, you’ve probably seen pictures from Antelope Canyon, whose twisting, flowing red rocks and brilliant sunbeams are perennial photo fodder. It’s not an overly large place…a small slot canyon with high walls carved out of the surrounding formation by wind and water. With the right camera gear though, the opportunity of a lifetime. I did not have the right camera gear.

Our two (required) Navajo guides were very personable, but it was pretty clear they weren’t going to take any guff from a bunch of tourists. I tried my best to get a few good pictures, but the light was against us (overcast) and I had no tripod. This and the nearby Wave formation are places I absolutely need to get back to some day.

Lady of the Desert, Antelope Canyon

Navajo Guides and The Flame, Antelope Canyon

Sandstone Curves, Antelope Canyon

While in Page we also stopped by the vertigo inducing heights where the Colorado makes a hairpin turn at Horseshoe Bend. Horseshoe is one of those places that your brain can’t initially process…It tries to make it less big than it actually is, to translate it to some relatable scale. The moment you see something human scale (in this case a passing motorboat) in that frame, your perspective is shattered, and the immensity of the world rushes in at you again. Back in the human scale of the SUV, we left town on the way to Zion. 

Horseshoe Bend panoramic, Page, Arizona

Desert Storm Colors, Horseshoe Bend, Page, Arizona

Visions of Utah - Monument Valley

The Mittens, Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Monument Valley

After the lunar planes of Arches, we made our way down to the Navajo Nation. The vast expanse of the Nation in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico is home to some of the ubiquitous sights of the Hollywood West. With a brief nod to Mexican Hat, we blasted down Route 163 to Monument Valley. The Navajo have invested well in tourism, and their tribal parks are a good example.

If you've ever seen a western movie, you've likely seen the formations of Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park. The chance to take a rough-bodied tour truck rattling down a dirt road into the midst of these giant mesas was incredible. The wind was whipping little bits of cloud across a deep blue desert sky, and drowned out the sound of the parking lot motorcoaches, crying children, and other tourist trappings behind us. There was a definite sense of immense solemnity as we passed in and out of the shadows of these behemoths. 

Even in this highly visited area, the challenges of the Nation poked through the carefully crafted tourist experience. The fancy new visitor center contrasted roughly with the broken-down trailer homes in the distance and the quiet girl who offered us turquoise jewelry from a rickety stand at a stop on the tour. 

Even with an acknowledgement of cultural differences, you could feel the shadow of the past looming long across the path here in this place where their ancestors held the line against the American genocide of the 19th and 20th centuries after the Long Walk. These wounds contrasted jarringly with the oddly overwhelming proliferation of John Wayne memorabilia and imagery throughout the visitor center and grounds. While Wayne certainly helped make the Valley the iconic face of the west in movies like Stagecoach, he also is the epitome of the cowboy in the simplistic cowboy versus Indians mentality. Like everything else in the Nation, the relationship between the brutal past and the Hollywood soaked present is complicated. Regardless, the landscape and People remain, shaped but not removed by the winds that have torn at them. 

Mesa Cliffs in Shadow, Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park panoramic

Mitten, Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Mittens and Sandstone, Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park

Visions of Utah - Arches

Sorth Window vista, Arches National Park

In 2006 we sojourned off to the National Parks of Utah for the first of what would become many epic adventures with our friends Nina and Seth. I didn't have a blog at the time, and social media wasn't quite a thing yet, so I've never written much about it. This isn't a travelogue of that trip in a linear fashion(even though I kept a detailed log of the trip, writing frantically between the whirlwind of sights in a small bound notebook). It's a collection of impressions, memories and photos I particularly liked. Most of the pictures were taken on an old Pentax K1000 or a tiny Fuji 3.2mp point and shoot. Hardly appropriate tools for such a photo-friendly environment, but some of the pictures remain among my favorite photos of all time. 

Arches National Park 

I remember being completely mentally unprepared for Arches. The sheer weight and immensity of the desert staggered me. It is an utterly alien landscape to a boy from rural upstate NY. Even as we paced cattle down highway 128, winding along the muddy Colorado, the close spaces still hadn't given way to the full scale of the land. We nestled in between massive fins of sandstone in the Devil's Garden campground. The vistas of unending high desert left me feeling minuscule, another eroded particle to be carved away by the wind. Stripped of the green sheath of life, the rocks spoke only to a solid vastness of space and time. When we encountered the fragile cryptobiotic crusts, it took a moment of mental adjustment to contemplate that any action of mine could possibly impact this ageless place.  Arches remains one of my favorite National Parks in some part because it most challenged any importance of my presence in a completely indifferent landscape. A lot of natural places of beauty leave me inspired and awed. Arches shook me.

Faces in the Rock, Arches National Park

Park Avenue, Arches National Park

Clockwise from top left: Devil's Tree, Idols, Hardscrabble Tree, Balanced Rock with Tree

Wall Arch, Arches National Park

Evening Tree, Arches National Park

             

Clockwise from top left: Solitude, Gates of Hell, Stuck in the Middle with You, North Window Vista

Photo Project: Distracted Zoo

                                                                                                        Lemur

We took our daughter Lydia to the zoo the other day and I brought along my camera. Zoo photography is usually a mixed bag. The challenges and rewards of shooting animals in the wild are replaced with an entirely different set at zoos.

You can get quite close to the animals but you also have to contend with the unwashed hordes of humanity jostling for places at the enclosures, and nocturnal animals who pretty much just sleep during the day. Add toddler-wrangling to that scenario, and you have a situation that's not especially ideal for contemplative photography.

Between managing an excitable two year old, and the massive throngs of people there that day, it was hard to really set up for shots. The real challenge for this was not to get the most remarkable shot possible, but simply to get a decent shot while juggling everything else. Since lugging around a tripod was out, everything had to be taken quickly, in so-so light. Fun, but exhausting. It was a bit liberating to ditch all of the worries about technique and exposure, and just shoot on the fly, hoping to get lucky.

Monkey

Flamingo Plumage

Periscope Ostrich

Lascivious Giraffe

Giraffe Lovin'

Chimpanzee

Lamps

Gorilla

Grizzly

reflected Black-bellied Whistling Duck

Cypress Knees

Orangutan

Sleepy Meerkat

While not part of the "photoshoot", this sign made me laugh.

After a day of running after a toddler, dragging an expedition's worth of toddler gear and camera, fighting through streams of humanity, in 100 degree heat and 100% humidity, I would have traded a forest's worth of orangutans for a chocolate bar. Don't even ask what ecological carnage I would have engaged in if you had offered a beer....

Photo Project: Necrography

One of the more valuable tools for modern amateur genealogists¹ is the comprehensive (and undeniably creepy), website www.Findagrave.com. As morbid as it may be, it's a great source of ancestral information. Graves give birth and death dates, locations, other family members, etc. If nothing else, they're a tangible record of an ancestor. There's something incredibly weird about finding a sense of connection based on pictures of tombstones. It's like being a really old, really boring Goth I guess.

                Like this Goth.                     Ok, actually, more like these Goths.

The website relies on volunteers to take pictures, record information, and share it. It's like social media for dead people (Gravebook? Buriedit? Restr? Oh God I'm going to hell...). You can even make requests if there's a grave with no picture. And people do this, on a regular basis.²  Since my exhaustive research (2 minutes of Google) does not suggest there is a name for photographing graves, I am going to coin one. I am gentrifying this questionable pursuit as "Necrography". Which I really, really hope is not slang the kids are using for something unpalatable.Since I'd benefited a lot from what other people have uploaded, and I had a free hour this morning, I thought I'd stop by a local cemetery.

A few of the graves of my ancestors, from findagrave.com

We actually have a really interesting little cemetery a block away from us. The Beeler Family cemetery is a pocket park that comprises an old family plot that's now surrounded by giant corporate headquarters. Nine members of a settler's family still rest here. It felt very odd to take pictures of the graves, even with good intent.

Afterwards, I checked the Findagrave website to see if there were other requests in the area. As it turns out, there were several requests for graves in a cemetery another street away. In for a creepy penny, in for a creepy pound...so off I went to Memorial Oaks. 

This is the LEAST fancy part of Memorial Oaks that I drove through. It only had about three ginormous fountains and the angels weren't weeping quite so fervently. 

So, Memorial Oaks is fancy. I mean, Old Money Fancy, not Donald Trump Fancy. It has beautiful lawns and statuary and fountains and weeping angels and the whole bit. Even in death, the rich are segregated from the rest of us. It was like the Less-than-Fresh Prince of Bel Air³. Even within this affluent enclave, however, there was an even FANCIER section where the truly rich could be segregated from the moderately rich. 

It also had this statue which I think is supposed to be hands praying, but looks like an afterlife high-five. "Eternal Rest! ^&%^ yeah, bro!"

It became pretty obvious at this point that I wasn't going to find any specifically requested graves by just driving around. As it turns out, there are a LOT of graves here. So I went into the office to see if they had, for lack of a more polite way to put it, an index of the dead. Unfortunately, they have to look up every location request by hand, so I settled on one request as a trial. They were very nice and sent me off with directions to find the Howards, who I assume were a very nice couple whose descendants wanted a picture (out of respect, I won't post the grave pictures here.) 

Like an exceptionally disturbing treasure map.

After all was said and done, I had a couple pictures to upload to Findagrave that will hopefully make some folks happy. For the future, I think unless someone can provide a specific location in the graveyard, the creepy factor is just too high for a repeat foray into this. 

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1 Much like when I discuss watching birds, I am careful to frame my recent interest in genealogy. When one says something like "I'm a birder" or "I'm into genealogy", it comes with some negative connotations...not all wholly undeserved. I'm always careful to point out that I'm a birder in the sense that I like watching and photographing wildlife, of which birds are a numerous subset. I'm into genealogy in the sense that I love family stories, and knowing our ancestor's history is a subset of that. Though, as counterpoint, I realize that these are two pursuits that are generally the domain of the more chronologically-advanced. Regardless, I'm not one to let social stigma deter my curiosity, so off we go^↩
2 Apparently some people are fanatical about it...deriving status from racking up the largest number of graves recorded. There have been several conflicts over competing records, etc. People you are creating drama over photographing GRAVES. You are not adult-ing correctly.^↩
3If I wasn't already going to hell for "Gravebook", this ought to seal the deal.^↩