Utah is unreal in every way, especially southern Utah. The geology is out of this world and unlike anywhere else in the world, I genuinely could spend my entire life traversing the state and still not see all of it. Finn and I decided to take a weekend and drive out to Moab/Hanksville to do it all. Hike, do some landscape photography, climb, bird, and bike. Late on Friday night we made it to Hanksville and camped below the impressive and looming Factory Butte, a very prominent feature jutting out of the desert riddled with thousands of steep valleys created by water runoff over the years. We woke up early on Saturday morning and began our hike on what might as well have just been Mars or the moon. The short hike into our destination was exciting as we knew what we were going to be seeing for sunrise. "Long Dong Silver", one of the world's most incredible spires, sits like a knife in a secluded part of the Hanksville Desert. It's breathtaking, it's awe-inspiring, its magical. It's also where people like to do nude photoshoots I guess... As we were standing above the spire shooting down on it with the fiery sun hitting the rocks behind, two people showed up and shouted to us us from afar something that sounded a lot like "y'all mind if we do a nude shoot here?". Not that we would've said no, but not hearing it fully, we said "go ahead", and watched the woman take her jacket off. It was below freezing. WELL below freezing. They did their thing, we tried not to laugh, and were thankful that they showed up after the peak of the first light glow had subsided so we could have the spire to ourselves. In hindsight, a friend of mine told me that that area is like the world's best mountain bike freeride area, so I'm kinda bummed we didn't ride our bikes out to the spire for some INSANE photos. Next time. (Continue below images.)
The nude shoot...
After leaving the spire, we headed back to Factory Butte for some photos, and made our way out of Hanksville. I genuinely could spend months here bumming around the desert spending every waking moment photographing the landscape and geologic features, it's just so incredible. We made a quick stop in Goblin Valley State Park and entirely missed the namesake of the park, we drove a couple miles in and decided we didn't want to pay for a state parks day pass... Bummer... Nonetheless, it was a really cool area and getting to see the bordering reef wad amazing. On our way to Moab we stopped in a random canyon off the interstate to try to get me my lifer Chukar. I finally photographed a Bewick's Wren, saw some cool pictographs, and almost ran over my lifer Chukar on the way out. (Continue reading below images.)
Once in Moab, we headed straight to our main destination, Day Canyon off of Potash Road. Almost a year prior to this trip, our friend group did a road trip out to Moab just to see the sights, and we sadly didn't have time to climb one of the coolest routes in the entire world: Pocket Rocket 5.10c. It's stunning. Almost 70 feet of the most incredibly pocketed strip of canyon wall you've ever seen (with a tiny bit of overhang off the deck) makes up the route. Some people hate it, some people think it's the holy grail of 5.10c. I'm in the camp of people that would say it's one of the coolest routes they've ever climbed. (Continue reading below images.)
After climbing Pocket Rocket, we decided to hit up Canyonlands National Park for some more alien landscapes and unreal scenery. To keep it short n' sweet, it brought Finn to tears and left me speechless. (Continue reading below images.)
We had a pretty epic campsite for the night too, surrounded by towering canyon walls and a nice little riparian corridor down by the river. After a dinner consisting of a can of refried beans and tortilla chips, I had the idea to try to see if there were any Western Screech-Owls at our campsite. I think I literally played one call and five instantly started calling back from pretty close. We spent the next hour or so tracking them around the campsite, and I got to fulfill a photographic dream of mine: photographing owls with stars as bokeh.
Sunday morning we got up and headed back towards Moab for our final adventure of the weekend, some slickrock biking. Ever see those videos of Jeeps rockcrawling on some pretty crazy steep sandstone? On that same state park, there's a mountain bike trail system that's pretty epic. I've never biked on anything so unbelievably steep, I think that the steepest grade we fought our way up was between 32-35 degrees according to my phone. It was a really fun trail to send, and I'd love to go back with a little more confidence (and no leaky fork...). I think that the most insane part to me was just how well you're able to grip the rock, but I suppose it does make sense as it is essentially really rough grit sandpaper. Definitely the most fun trail I've ever biked. Sadly after that, we had a good 7 hour drive ahead of us, and needed to get back to Fort Collins. (Click on images to view uncompressed).
