My initial visit to Utah was to Salt Lake City and westward across the Great Salt Lake on our family vacation in 1973, though any of my Dad's photographic slides were misplaced or lost due to humidity-related algal and/or fungal damage during the following years. (Though some Mesa Verde National Park slides remain from 1973.)
There was a quick revisit to Salt Lake City during my 1974 Road Trip (with only a Kodak Instamatic), then followed by a 1977 Geology Field Camp visit to Dinosaur National Monument, Canyonlands National Park, and Arches National Monument (now National Park).
Because a temporary camera-shutter failure during the 1977 field trip left me with zero 35 mm slides of Arches National Monument, I returned there in 1979 but the same malady again befell my Miranda Sensorex II. (Oddly enough, the 1977 shutter malfunction somehow "fixed itself" so at least I had some slides from Mesa Verde and Canyonlands. During the shutter malfunction, the camera operation sounded normal.)
Figure 1.
Figure 2. ("Dressed up for educational uses.)
After the 1979 total shutter failure, though I purchased two more used Miranda cameras (a Sensorex and another Sensorex II) to use as back-ups, there were no significant Utah revisit opportunities until 2016. With the subsequent passage of the years, my desire to "defeat the Moab, UT camera demons" was elevated to moderately-obsessed "Bucket List status".
In 1982 I purchased a Pentax MX to replace the Mirandas and then I "went digital" in 2002, though only with "point and shoot"cameras because of the initial costs, until June 2015 when a friend gave me a Nikon D10 DSLR.
After returning from Arizona Trip of 2015 #1, I then purchased a Pentax K50 when I decided to make Arizona Trip #2 later in July 2015. [In the wake of my first wife's passing on May 1, 2015, I needed some more "solitary time" away from Georgia.]
"I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone because they reflect more."
Thomas Jefferson,
Letter to John Banister, Jr.,
June 19, 1787.
Other than revisiting Monument Valley to find "the place where Forrest Gump got tired of running" (below) and photographing a few other Monument Valley sites in both Arizona and Utah, my next goal was to return to the Flagstaff, AZ area to revisit Sunset Crater the next day and then on to Phoenix to see my daughter and her family again.
Figure 3.
My first "digital age" significant visit to Utah was my 2016 Arizona trip. As with the first Arizona visit of 2015, after my daughter's family made a summer return to Georgia to avoid the Phoenix heat, I again ferried their car and dog back to Phoenix, while she and her kids flew back there.
This 2016 trip gave me a little more time to plan my return to Georgia by way of Kingman, AZ (for a Turquoise stop), then Zion National Park and Arches National Park in Utah. After a brief beer stop at Total Wine and then a burger stop at a Freddy's Steakburger, due to the fading daylight and motel reservations in St. George, Utah, there were no further nature photo opportunities possible in the Las Vegas area. And spending any time - by myself - on the Las Vegas Strip offered absolutely no appeal.
During my planning for the journey, I entertained the idea of swinging west into California to visit the numerous geologic features of Death Valley and then the Mammoth Lakes, California area, but doing Death Valley in early August just didn't seem like a wise idea area. [However, after generous winter El Niño rains, springtime wildflower photography in Death Valley is definitely a Bucket List item.]
After a gas fill-up near the Las Vegas Motorspeedway, as I wheeled onto I-15, to the northeast I was greeted with an ominous gray wall of thunderstorm clouds in the distance. From that point, there was a race to cover as much ground as possible in the last vestiges of daylight before the expected deluge. As I was reaching Glendale, NV in the post-sundown gloom, the rain was beginning as a prelude to the intense lightning storm that still awaited.
Northeast of Littlefield, AZ, where I-15 snakes through the Southern Virgin River Gorge, during the intense lightning flashes, I could tell that the scenery was spectacular and worthy of a future, daylight photography visit.
[More to come.]
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