Utah Parks Road Trip: Day 1, Arches National Park

"South Window," Arches National Park, Moab, Utah

It’s finally time for our Christmas-New Years Southern Parks of Utah Road Trip!  You never would have thought it would take 4 days to get from DC to Utah, but it’s already worth it!  In case you didn’t hear, the DC area’s biggest snowstorm in years and years and years dumped more than 2 feet of snow in our backyard starting last Friday night.  Of course, as our luck would have it, all Saturday flights out of DC were cancelled.  My husband and I rebooked for Sunday but couldn’t go because there were no taxis!  We finally just got out on Tuesday.  Made it to San Diego, then to Denver, but it seemed the snow was following us.  Moab, Utah’s biggest snowstorm in the last 25 years hit on Tuesday, and we ended up stuck in Denver for the night.  And wouldn’t you know it, Wednesday morning when we woke up, it was snowing in Denver!  Well, good thing Denver can handle snow better than DC can.  We got into Moab just 2 hours late.  I’ve had bad trips to Africa that took less time than this one!  We’re so thankful for the really nice Enterprise Rental Car folks at the Moab airport – Kim and Terry – who held our car for us for 4 days and through multiple phone calls, who thought to let us know when it was snowing in Moab, and promised to meet us at the airport no matter what time we came in at!  Now how’s that for Southern Utah hospitality??!!

Anyway, getting into Moab around 2 pm still left us an afternoon and a sunset.  Arches National Park, our first stop, was on the way to the hotel, so we spent the afternoon visiting the park.  We’re told that Moab almost NEVER get snow like this.  There was only 4-8 inches (which seems like nothing after DC), but evidently, this is the most snow they’ve had in 25 years, and when it does snow, it usually melts after 2 hours!  I guess our bad luck with this trip was good luck after all.

So I decided it’d be fun to do this photo-a-day blog post of this trip, but it’s been hard picking out a single photo for today’s post!  Here it is…  the “South Window” arch.  I like it because of the rocks peeking out from under the snow at the bottom of the photo and how they form two diverging lines that lead up to the South Window on the left and another rock formation on the right.  Plus, the sandstone illuminated by the glow of sunset also glows red, while the rocks in the foreground, which are in shade, are a darker color, which separates the lines from the focus of the photo…  Magnificent, isn’t it?

I shot it with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera and Canon 24-105mm f/4L IS USM lens at 28 mm.  Because I don’t like noisy images, I used the lowest possible ISO of 50 and an aperture of f/8.  (f/8 or f/11 are usually the sharpest apertures for most lenses.)  Because the sun had already set (though still a glow of light), I had to leave the shutter open for 15 seconds.  That means I needed my Manfrotto 190CXPRO3 3-Section Pro Carbon Fiber Tripod and Manfrotto 486RC2 Compact Ball Head.

Tomorrow, we set off for Bryce Canyon, but we’ll come back to Moab for another few days at the end before returning home…  To download a pdf on buying fine art photography, click here.