JELyon

When we reached out to the local Jeep about trails to hit in Moab, we were told by one gentleman who’s spent a lot of time in the area that we would miss an amazing opportunity if we didn’t drive Potash Road out of Moab to Shafer Trail into Canyonlands National Park.

And he was correct. The views were absolutely stunning, and very different than the red rock that is synonymous with Moab. The landscape swallows one up in canyon walls, big skies and miles of canyon floor.

This is a photo from the Shafer Trail Viewpoint of the road that winds 1,500 feet down sandstone cliffs to the canyon floor.

We were lucky enough to be able to head down to Lojitas, Texas for Christmas week. Two nights before Christmas, a sandstorm blew through the Big Bend area, with sustained winds of 30-40 miles an hour, and gusts of at least 50. We’d expected a brilliant sunset Christmas Eve with all that extra dust in the air, but it was just a hazy gray showing.

Taking a chance on Christmas evening, we drove to the Dinosaur exhibit, which provides a good vantage point of the Chisos, to see if we could get a nice sunset over the Mountains.

The evening exceeded all my expectations, as I watched the sun set for two hours, waiting to get this shot. It was particularly gratifying to have an idea of what I wanted the shot to look like, and be in the right place at the right time to watch the scene unfolded as I’d hoped.

This is an infrared photo taken with a Canon 20D, converted for IR photography, almost certainly somewhere along the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River that runs through the park.

There’s a totally different workflow on the front end, when shooting with IR, but I really like the results when everything comes together in a photo.