Dawn At White Pocket
I couldn't resist sending one more blog post on White Pocket. This is from a trip I made to Utah earlier in May of this year. As you may recall, we drove for three hours, the last hour through deep sand, just to get to this location. On the afternoon we arrived we were sandblasted by fifty mph winds as we hiked over the rock formation. And we spent the night sleeping in the Jeep, wearing every article of clothing we had, barely able to keep warm.
The next morning, sixty minutes before sunrise, I started walking back towards the rock formation and saw something I had never witnessed before. A group of eight photographers were walking out of the landscape near sunrise. Out! Their back turned away from the beautiful pastel colors of the rocks. It turns out this was a group that spent the entire night on the rocks doing night sky and Milky Way photography.
I walked toward the pastel colored rock formations and made this image within twenty minutes of arriving. The harsh sunlight of yesterday was gone and a pale blue colored the surface of the white rocks. It was amazing how soft and different everything looked. I made this image and then kept walking and exploring, making more images along the way. As the sun came up, the light and colors quickly changed and it didn't take long for the harsh light of day to return. I am starting to prefer this pre-dawn, blue hour, light. It's very calming and peaceful. The only problem is that it comes even earlier than sunrise!
I have released the Southern Utah Gallery Page on my website. Click that link to get there and view a small collection of images from white Pocket, Coral Pink Sand Dunes, the canyons of Escalante National Monument, and a return hike on the Fairyland Loop in Bryce Canyon.