After driving Potash Road and the Shafer Trail, we returned to Dead Horse Point for sunset photography. It was a heavily overcast evening, so prospects for a golden sunset hour did not look promising.
Desert plants sink their roots into the thin soil and hard rock, where scant moisture hides from the harsh sun. The V shape of the niche in the rock is reminiscent of similar shapes seen in Georgia O’Keefe’s artwork.
Followers probably noted the winding road through the landscape as seen from Dead Horse Point in previously posted images. After shooting sunrise at Dead Horse Point, we traveled that road. This post contains a few of the photographys made along that road.
I think this road might be refered to by different names and I’ve mostly heard folks talk about this route as Shafer Trail, but my map shows this portion as Potash Road, to the best that I can decipher the map labels
This pond is a part of a potash production facility. Potash (potasium chloride) is disolved from underground rock with water pumped from the Colorado River and put into evaporation ponds. Blue dye is added to the water to increase solar energy absorption that heats the water speeding up the evaporation process. These ponds can be seen from the Dead Horse Point overlook and are in some of my photos made at that overlook.
The road we traveled changes its name to Shafer Trail somewhere along the route, I think at the point where it enters Canyonland National Park. This photo was made at an overlook near where Shafer Trail exits onto a paved road near Canyonlands NP Visitors Center.
I try to keep my blogs in chronological order and use images in my blogs with links to my photos posted to Flickr, but sometimes I slip up. A few days ago, I realized that somehow I had skipped editing sunset photos made the first day we were at Dead Horse Point, Utah and I had begun to post photos to Flickr from the second evening at Dead Horse Point. So I’m going to violate my chronological order for at least portions of these two days of shooting, posting images from day 2 ahead of day 1.
We went out early on day 2 at Dead Horse Point for sunrise photography.
I set up my camera and watched the sunrise light as it moved across the wonderful and rugged landscape at Dead Horse Point, making a number of images for a sunrise sequence.
A brief look at my camera screen in the early morning, showed that I at least got star photos during the night. I always have some concerns that the program worked as planned, after setting up the camera to shoot well after dark and then retiring to bed. Unfortunately, upon reviewing those images on a big screen it was obvious that the stars were big blurry bright spots. So apparently I either accidentally shifted the focus a little, during the final set up or maybe I forgot to switch off auto focus. I think it was most likely the first, since I vaguely recall having to shift the lens back into auto focus mode for early morning sunrise shots, after realizing the first shot was not in focus. I don’t completely trust my eyesight to get really good focus, when in manual mode.
But I still have two batches of star images to process, which I will have to get to soon.
After shooting a few early morning images, we decided it was time to move on and headed towards the Moab area. Moab has become much more popular than it was during my first few visits here. Now it is very crowded all the time it seems and the rapid growth rate is highly evident. We considered several possibilities for finding a campsite in this high demand camping area, finally selecting a small public land camping area not very far from Dead Horse Point and we were lucky enough to have two or more empty sites from which to select.
After setting up camp, we did a bit of exploring in the local area, stopping by Dead Horse Point to scout it briefly.
Dead Horse Point 1, iPhone Image
This scene reminded me of hiking in Canyonlands NP many years ago.
Dead Horse Point 2, iPhone Photo
After this brief visit to Dead Horse Point, we will return later for sunset photography.
