Travel with Sherpa

Getting night shots at Arches was one thing, there were plenty of other people out doing similar things in the area, so I never felt alone. And the hike was flat and short. Last night was a completely different thing. I started my hike down Queen’s Trail just after sunset, stopping to evaluate different views and options. I didn’t want to get too far down for safety and energy reasons, as my legs were still “talking to me” from all of the recent activity.

At the beginning of the walk I saw a couple of deer coming up out of the amphitheater and definitely not using the trails, a very cool sight!

I finally identified a few possible locations within the first 3/4 of a mile of the trail, so I sat down and just listened to the silence for a while waiting for it to get dark, then I got to work. In response to earlier questions about how I am getting the pictures I thought I would do a bit something different here. I only brought a very small flexible leg tripod in this trip, which I also used to secure the camera to the roll bars of the ATV, so I have to get a little creative. It is essentially this set up, but in order to get the camera pointing I the sky the phone is reversed in the grip, meaning about half of the screen is covered up.

So this is what I did for about an hour last night in the middle of trail. I got a wee bit dusty… I set the iPhone camera to “RAW” and typically max out the exposure, which seems to be about 30 seconds for most shots. In some cases I will use my headlamp as a manual full flash, but still figuring that out.

But all in all I say it is worth the effort, with another round of pictures I am pretty darn happy with. The only editing on these pics was to take out a sign from the last one. Everything else is exactly how it came out.

The hike back up was just weird. It was about 11:00 by now, and I could still see lights at various places around the rim, but absolutely no signs of activity below the rim. It was completely dark without my headlamp, and I had one of my trekking poles out for the extra balance in case I stripped in a rock or something like that. Very surreal and eerie, and once again the video won’t do it justice.

Getting back to the RV park so late, I didn’t want to make too much noise, and I was cold and lazy to be honest, so I didn’t bother trying to level the RV. The result was me stumbling around like Jack Sparrow trying to make it the actual 3 feet from the bed to the bathroom. My body just couldn’t reconcile the weird slope while still half asleep, so I nearly ended up in the driver seat before I was able to get myself more or less situated. Amusing now, not so much at 3 AM…