Inspiration Point, Bryce Canyon: dawn light spreads across the hoodoos.
Images from two weeks in the canyon lands of the US South West (Utah, Nevada & Arizona): iconic destinations, almost all in National Parks. This is a 'portfolio post' that links to seven PDF 'books' of the images I made during this road trip in late September/October, 2022. Although each of these locations offers spectacular sights and colours — and each of them is unique — there are obvious similarities in the forms and colors of the US south-west that justify gathering them all under the one banner "Ancient Earth".
Clicking on any of the images below will take you to a PDF 'book' (between 10-20mb) on my Google Drive. Please do not view the images there but download the book and view the pages 'full-screen' on your computer or tablet.
Just north of Moab in southern Utah the Arches National Park comprises some 2000 'arches', the characteristic weathered remains of tilted Entrada sandstone strata from the Jurassic area.
A collection made during a journey from Bryce and Zion canyons down the 'grand staircase' — a series of plateaux descending toward the Colorado River in Southern Utah. Also some images from the La Sal Mountains, east of the Colorado in Southern Utah. It had been a dry year, the aspens were probably past their peak autumn colour. Still...
High altitude canyons in Southern Utah characterised by the buff-colored, ancient, Navaho sandstone. Zion is a ravine whose cliffs tower 900m above the Virgin river at the edge of the Colorado plateau. Bryce 'Canyon' is in fact a series of spectacular amphitheatres along the edge of a high plateau that forms the top of the Grand Staircase in Southern Utah.
Views from the top of the "Islands in the Sky" mesa overlooking a vast desolation of ravines, canyons, hoodoos and and isolated sandstone buttes near the junction of the Colorado and Green rivers in southern Utah.
Nothing matches the awe provoked by a view from the edge of the Grand Canyon. Nothing more unfathomable unless the sky. Images from the Southern Rim.
The 'movie makers' West' is iconic and the light ever-changing under broad skies. The isolated buttes, wide button-grass plains and distant cliffs of Monument Valley and the lesser-known Valley of the Gods comprise, however, a unique landscape in the high far reaches of the Colorado plateau on the border between Utah and Arizona.
Not far downstream from Lake Powell where the Colorado River was dammed in the early 1960s is a sort of memory of the ancient power of the river: a mighty canyon, 300m deep, carved in the shape of a horseshoe by a meander of the river. Also in this region, the startling 'underground' canyons of the Antelope creek where the pale light piercing the narrow crevasses from above draws deep saturated colours from the rocks.
