The Traveling Widower

Tag: moab

  • Solo Traveling Again

    A photographer standing on rocky terrain at night, capturing the Milky Way, surrounded by coyotes with glowing eyes and a mountain lion in the background.

    April 20th, 2026

    Monday was my first “free” day since I arrived in Moab last Wednesday. The workshop ended on Sunday evening, and the entire group was heading home in the morning, leaving me with two full days before I left Moab. The Sunday photo session ended relatively early (2:00AM), so I was able to get some sleep, and even made it to the hotel breakfast for a change. Not that the breakfast was worth waking up for – my only complaint with this hotel. I decided to just take it easy in the morning – work on photos, do some laundry, just relax a bit, before heading off to the park. I really wanted to do some hiking and see the park in daylight, but also did not want to kill myself either. I was worn out, and still wanted to do one more Milky Way shoot that night – the weather was supposed to be perfect. And I’m a glutton for punishment. Always have been and probably always will.

    I headed out to the park around noon, and planned to check out the very far end of the main road – I also wanted to visit the location for my solo shoot that evening (Sand Dune Arch) which I had been to only once, in the dark, and had never ventured out of the parking lot. After that, I wanted to see two other arches which required some hiking – Skyline and Landscape.

    The park was relatively empty compared to the weekend – I guess everyone clears out on Sunday, and the crowds grow towards the weekend with traffic from Colorado and Utah. I really enjoyed just driving through the park without rushing, stopping at some pullouts to just enjoy the fantastic scenery.  The Park Avenue trail, which I had ventured out into my first night  in Moab, is beautiful as are the pullouts for the Courthouse Towers. I decided to hold off taking photos until the next day. Never a good idea. Carpe diem, so they say.

    I eventually made it to the Sand Dune Arch parking lot, which was packed. The trail to the arch starts a short distance from the parking lot,  and runs through a narrow slot canyon between two huge fins of rock. Most of the trail is like a nice, sandy beach so of course there were gobs of families, with kids playing in the sand. Fun to watch. The arch is rather small, and easy to miss, except for all the people doing selfies. I made note of where I wanted to set up my tripod that night, near the base of that trail so I could get the view of the sky with the big fin rocks as a foreground. I should have noticed one important feature though, and planned out in more detail the best placement for my tripod – more on that later. Hint – it’s much easier to scope out a site in daylight than in the dark.

    A landscape featuring tall red rock formations against a clear blue sky, with sparse vegetation and sandy ground in the foreground.
    Narrow canyon with tall red rock walls and sandy ground, featuring a large boulder and green vegetation under a clear blue sky.
    Red rock formations under a clear blue sky with sparse vegetation in the foreground.
    A scenic view of red rock formations in a narrow canyon, featuring a natural arch and soft sandy ground under bright blue skies.

    My next stop was the Skyline Arch, also a bit crowded though I think the rocky trail turned some of the less agile visitors away. This was a good confidence builder for me – I was really having balance issues walking around in the dark all week. It was much easier hiking during the day,  not lugging a tripod in one hand, one hiking stick in the other, and trying to stay upright without being able to see much in front of me with just a glow from my red headlamp. I had little if any difficulty negotiating this trail. And the arch was quite nice.

    A natural rock arch formed in red sandstone, surrounded by desert vegetation and clear blue skies.
    Scenic view of red rock formations under a clear blue sky, with desert vegetation in the foreground.

    My final stop for the day was at the end of the road – the Devils Garden, which has the trailhead for the longest arch in the park, Landscape Arch (plus quite a few others). The campground and picnic areas are located there as well. The trail was only 3 miles round trip, but I wore my camera backpack anyway,to hold water and a snack. I looked like a serious hiker. The trail was packed gravel the entire way, easy walking, but also had a couple of relatively steep hills to climb – a good workout and test for my cardiac issues. No problemo! Like most of the older hikers on the trail, I did take some breathers (or pulse reduction breaks) at the top of each hill, but I still made pretty good time getting to the arch. I’d grade that one a ‘Meh’. Not that exciting. But it was a nice hike, a good workout with some great views so I’m glad I did it.

    A desert landscape featuring red rock formations, scattered shrubs, and a fallen log in the foreground under a clear blue sky.
    A person wearing sunglasses and a yellow cap stands in front of reddish rock formations in a desert landscape under a clear blue sky.
    Scenic view of red rock formations under a blue sky with scattered clouds.
    A scenic view of a natural stone arch nestled between rugged red rock formations, with sparse vegetation in the foreground against a clear blue sky.

    Since I was planning another late night outing, I headed back to the hotel to relax after this hike, maybe take a dip in the pool/spa, and have some dinner. The PhotoPills application (I’ll discuss in another post) indicated that the Milky Way would peak over the Sand Dune Arch fins around 3AM, so I intended to take a long nap before leaving for the park again.

    Alone in the dark

    It was a bit strange driving through the park at 11:30PM by myself after four nights of being with a group. It was even stranger finding a place to set up my tripod on my own, and then standing there in a very dark,  isolated spot – there was not much road traffic at all. I could keep my headlight on if I wanted since there was nobody else around, but it was still a little scary. But, the weather was warm, and the sky was perfectly clear so I just focused on setting up my camera, and tried not to think about mountain lions, coyotes, or other wild creature wandering around in the dark. I had a lot of time to kill, so I went back to the car for a while to listen to the radio, and snooze for a bit. I really missed having people to talk to. After an hour, I headed back to my tripod to start taking photos.

    Just about the time the MW had “moved” (the earth is moving not the Milky Way) over the rock formation, a horde of cars pulled into the parking lot, and a large group started working their way towards me – this was another astrophotography workshop, likely the same ones that hogged the site the other night. Fortunately, they just passed me by without saying a word, and set up out of sight further down the trail. Not a very friendly group. The trip lead did make some comment that I was in a lousy spot. 

    Regardless of his comment, I continued shooting for another  hour or so, checking every 5 minutes to view the relationship of the MW to the rock formation – it changes very quickly, and I wanted to make sure I got the core of the Milky Way in a few of the shots. I did notice by accident though, that there was a problem where I had decided to place my tripod. I was pretty much right next to the trail sign. Hard to see that in the dark – that’s where I should have been more careful in my daytime preparation. I checked the next day, and the sign does show up in the foreground as a rectangular outline. Not everyone will notice that, but I’m sure a competition judge will. My bad.

    After a few hours of standing pretty much in the same place, I packed up the tripod and very carefully walked back down the trail to the parking lot – I was nice enough to use the dim red light so as not to impact the other group. I shot a couple of more photos from the parking lot (see below), loaded up the car, and pulled out of the lot with my dims on…it was the right thing to do.

    So that was the official end of my introduction to astrophotography – I have a lot of photos to process now, and that will keep me busy at home for a while. I’ll do a trip summary post once I have a few images worth sharing (I included two below – first attempts).

    Peace.

    Night sky filled with stars and the Milky Way over towering rock formations.
    A night sky filled with stars above jagged rock formations, showcasing the Milky Way galaxy.

  • Moab & Arches National Park – First Impressions

    A vintage GMC truck with a playful face painted on the front, featuring large eyes and a big smiling mouth. The truck is rusted and weathered, parked in front of a wooden building with trees and a cloudy sky in the background.

    April 16th, 2026

    This has been a very different kind of trip for me so far – I usually have enough free time to work on blog posts, but I have been either driving, hiking, or doing something with cameras pretty much the entire time I’ve been here. And finding time to sleep has been a problem as well. So, here is an update on this trip before my afternoon nap, and heading out for about a 12 hours photo shoot this evening…..in the freezing cold.

    My flight out to Salt Lake City was uneventful – it’s only a 2 hour flight, and we got in early. For the first time in a very long time, I even arrived at the airport slightly less than 2 hours from departure. I’m living on the edge these days..

    This is the first time I’ve flown into Salt Lake City since, oh, maybe 1980 when I had a class in some long forgotten technology. I’ll bet the airport did not have jetways back then, and you boarded/departed the plane on stairs. Anyway, the airport is enormous now, and finding the rental car counters was a challenge. I eventually found Budget, got a little Chevy SUV-like thing, and headed south-east to Moab. What a beautiful drive! Once you get out of the main highway (US 15) past Provo, the landscape is incredible. It was a very pleasant drive on a mostly four-lane highway with lots of rest stops,  but it was very nice to finally motor into Moab around 5 o’clock. 

    As I mentioned in the last post, I have only been to Moab once before, in my undergraduate geology field camp back in 1972. Moab back then was a mining town – there was a huge uranium mine and processing plant, which closed in 1984, leaving a lot of tailings and waste to clean up. Back then, there was not much of a reason for tourists to flock here, so the town was pretty small. Now the main street is filled with brew pubs (yes, in Utah), restaurants, jeep tour offices and of course the usual tourist shops selling t-shirt/western type stuff. And a lot of hotels. And at least four ice cream and/or gelato shops. I kind of like the place – the town has nice vibes, sort of a larger version of Kanab Ut. And it is a 10 minute drive to the park entrance.

    A street view of a small town with shops, including a sign for Arches Trading Post. People walk along the sidewalk, and cars are parked nearby. The sky is bright with clouds and there are mountains in the background.

    After settling into a very nice room and grabbing some dinner at a nearby restaurant, I decided to take advantage of what was forecast to be a cloudless, but a bit windy, night. I might as well give it a try on my own. I did a Google search (of course) on the best location in the park for night photography, and chose one that sounded interesting (Balanced Rock), which was not too deep a drive into the park since I was pretty tired from the flight and drive. I loaded my gear and warm clothing into my sporty little Chevy, and headed off to the park a bit before sunset. 

    There were no lines getting into the park – it is open 24X7 but the entry booths are not staffed at night. Once you get past the entry point, the drive was one big “OMG” for me. The landscape is incredible – enormous walls of red sandstone, huge fins and rock towers. Absolutely spectacular. Very much different than Zion or Bryce. It was about a ten minute drive to the parking lot for the Balanced Rock – I pulled in, and did a quick walk-around to figure out where to set up once it got dark. And took a few pictures while it was light of course.

    A man with glasses and a winter hat stands in front of distinctive rock formations during dawn, surrounded by desert vegetation.
    A clear evening sky transitioning from dusk to night, featuring a prominent contrail from an aircraft and a small celestial body, with a silhouetted mountain range in the foreground.
    A balanced rock formation in a desert landscape with blue sky, featuring a tall, slender column topped by a large boulder.

    There were a few other cars in the lot, also waiting for nightfall, and a steady stream of tourists stopping for selfies. Once the sun went down, few if any cars stopped by, but there was a steady stream of traffic heading towards the park exit, even at 10PM, there were still cars driving by. This was a problem for night photography – with a 20 second shutter speed, a passing car can ruin a shot. Or in some cases as I discovered, it actually helps to have the rocks “light painted”.

    A nighttime landscape featuring distinctive rock formations under a starry sky, with a visible meteor streaking across the scene.

    The other problem I had was with groups wandering around in the dark – it was incredibly dark so that you could not even see a foot in front of you. Every now and then, I would hear voices of people coming down the path and had to warn them before they walked into my tripod. There were also groups with flashlights, randomly pointing at the rock formations. Crazy town. 

    Eventually, I had my fill of this location, and decided to head back towards town. I made one more stop at another location requiring a short walk down a gravel path, and after that, headed back to the hotel. I was way too tired to look at any of the results, and just collapsed in bed.

    The next morning, I downloaded the photos on the SSD card to my laptop, and started doing some editing using Adobe Lightroom CC – I have been learning how to use this software, (Youtube videos), but I’m still a novice. Mostly what I did was changes to exposure, clarity, shadows – all basic editing, which is allowed in competition. I was surprisingly pleased at how some of the shots came out, given my lack of experience with astrophotography –  I’ve still got a lot to learn about camera settings and processing with Lightroom. That’s why I’m taking this course.

    A clear night sky filled with numerous stars and constellations, with a gradient from dark blue to light near the horizon.
    A night sky filled with stars above towering rock formations, with a prominent balancing rock illuminated by light, and a faint streak of what appears to be a meteor or satellite.
    A stunning night sky filled with stars above a rocky formation, illuminated by a soft orange glow.

    And you can get a little crazy with the editing and get some very unnatural colors.

    A starry night sky over a unique rock formation, featuring a prominent balancing rock and lush vegetation silhouetted against the blue background.

    Thursday was another free day – the course officially started at 5:00PM when the group first met with the trip lead. Since I had most of the day free, I decided to check out the park in the daylight. Unfortunately, the weather was uncooperative for photography – heavy cloud cover and a lot of wind. But, I wanted to check out some of the famous arches and do a little hiking. The park was crowded, but not too bad – only a 15 minute wait to get through the entrance.

    Cars waiting in line at a park entrance with red rock formations in the background.

    First on my list was the best known feature of the park, the Delicate Arch. There are two trails to see this feature – one requires 3 miles of hiking on steep, rocky terrain, which gets you right up to the arch. The other is a mile hike up a steep, rocky trail which gets you to viewing area where you can see the hordes of people in the distance who hiked up the more difficult trail. I opted for the long range view, and I’m glad I did. 

    A natural stone arch formation with visitors in the foreground, set against a clear sky.
    A landscape view of reddish rock formations under a cloudy sky, featuring distinct hoodoo shapes and cliffs.

    Next on my list were the Windows, two large arches close to another well known feature, the Double Arch. The lighting was extremely flat by then, but I hiked up some of the trials for the fun of it – I’ve got a few more free days, so I’ll hopefully get a chance to photograph these in better conditions. 

    A natural rock arch formation in a red desert landscape, with a winding stone path leading towards it and sparse greenery surrounding the area.
    A desert landscape featuring a prominent rock arch in the background, surrounded by red sandstone formations, with dry vegetation and twisted tree roots in the foreground.
    Rock formation with an arch and tower-like structure surrounded by desert terrain and shrubs.

    I met up with the rest of the group later that afternoon – a good mix of folks, mostly from the Denver area, but a few from other parts of the country. There was also a mix of experience with the group – some had been on this same trip before with the same lead, and most everyone had prior experience with astrophotography. I also had a bad case of gear envy – many of had higher end cameras and lenses, a few with the top end Sony cameras. It also became apparent on how this was different from all my other trips – this was all about the process and technical details of astrophotography. The trip lead is an expert in this field, and the focus of the course is all about the camera gear and understanding the fine details of tuning it for capturing low light from the stars. What was missing from the initial workshop session and first outing, was any discussion of the park and region, unlike Road Scholars and National Geographic trips. No culture, no geology, no flora or fauna – just cameras and how to shoot the stars. I doubt if I will ever focus much on star photography after this trip – this was just one of those topics I’m interested in enough to take a course like this, and I will be doing more night photography for the Northern Light trip. But I cannot see myself investing in the specialized gear and software for stacking photos of the Milk Way or creating those cool spiral shots of star tracking. But that could change I guess.

    Our first workshop session was enlightening though – I learned a lot about the fancy camera I have, and the basics of star photography. We then headed out for our first session at 11PM – the weather was not exactly conducive for photography – cloud cover, cold, very windy, but the lead wanted to at least show us how to “tune” the camera settings, and that needed to be done out in the wild. The bare basics were how to set your focus correctly – that’s not as easy as it sounds. I had fortunately lucked out in getting the settings right on my own, but now understood more on how to balance between the aperture, shutter speed and ISO to get the sharpest photos. And for focusing the camera….well, you don’t just set your focus to infinity. You’ll wind up getting blurry stars. Why? The stars are beyond infinity! You actually just have to pick a star, not a planet, and manually focus on it until it is small and clear, and then tape the focus ring on the lens. You’re all set at that point.

    Enough technical details for now. We headed out in five cars – I decided to drive on my own in case I was too tired and wanted to head back early. It really did not matter – it was too windy and cold to do anything other than set the focus under the trip leads supervision, and then we headed back to the hotel. The clouds were rolling in again anyway, so there was no sense in staying any later. The spot we wound up in for our calibration exercise was an issue for me – we had to hike down a rocky trail in the dark – the trail would not have been a problem for me in the daylight, with my hiking stick, but a bit frightening with only my headlamp to light the path. I wound up using my tripod as a hiking stick on the way back. No damage done, and I did get to sleep by 1:30AM. 

    I did not get much in the way of photos from this second day (first of the trip) – I’ve included a few of the Windows arches (more stairs to climb!), and some other odds and ends including Delicate Arch, taken from a distance. This evening (Friday) we are heading out for sunset, and then multiple stops for Milky Way photography, and should be back by dawn. The skies will be clear, but the temperatures will be down in the teens. I did not pack for winter, and had to buy some thermal underwear. I’ll be spending a lot of time in the car with the heater on.

    One last strange photo – never seen an outhouse with one of these before.

    A stainless steel squat toilet in a restroom, featuring a round opening in the center and textured foot positions on either side.

    On that note….Peace.