I am an inveterate early riser, especially when camping, the early morning light is often the best of the day, and I usually get it to myself too! This is the southeastern edge of the San Rafael Swell, taken from inside our campsite. Just after dawn. (As always, click on the Photo's to see larger versions)
The folding and carving of the land is beautiful to behold and I can just sit and look at it for hours. This is a sere and dry land, starkly beautiful, where the only things that survive are the tough ones.
This is just behind (South) of our camp, we were in what I call a "Dirt" camp, on BLM land, which means that it is not maintained or serviced, but used and established without government interference. The best part is the folks that camp out there seem to do a very good job of cleaning up after themselves, there was no trash or littering around. A few yahoo's with ATV's had driven over the sign that said no motorized vehicles, but fortunately had not gone into this area much at all.
Even in the middle of nowhere, you can still see the transitory signs of man. I was amazed at how many airplane contrails were in the sky that morning.
After cleaning up camp we headed to my favorite slot canyon, Little Wild Horse. Now you may be asking yourself at this point, where are the people you were with? Well, I make it a policy to not post people expecially kids pictures on here, it is too easy to save these photos, and I do post the largest size allowed (for your viewing pleasure) and I would prefer to not have some kids parent coming to me ticked off that someone stole their kids head and put it on a website somewhere.This is an old friend, but easier to negotiate than in the past, a LOT of sand was washed out of this canyon this winter/spring.
This pour off was easier to negotiate than it looks, but was not there last year, if I remember correctly this area was under sand when I hiked this last August.
This is the last 1/4-1/2 mile of the canyon, it is COMPLETELY changed from last year. I am kind of glad I wasn't there to get killed as the water pushed through here, there are LARGE boulders that have newly fallen and this stream bed has produced a lot of new rock. Wish I could have photographed it from a safe place though. There were areas that were 100ft wide and showed signs of 10+ft of water having gone through...
Heading back downcanyon towards the light made for some beautiful golden glow from around corners.
I am still looking for last years photo's but last year there was sand much higher than in this shot.
This is more in the nature of an experimental processing of this shot. Not in love with it, but at the same time it is interesting to see it differently than in real life.
