Do you realise the last time we went on a proper spontaneous road trip was 2014?
Twelve years. Twelve years of flights and hotels and airport lounges, which I am not complaining about, but there is a specific kind of trip where nobody knows where they’re sleeping tomorrow and you just point the car somewhere and go. We hadn’t done one of those since Route 66.
It was time to rectify that. Especially since my bud might be about to get locked down by a job that eats his calendar.
So we went. Chestnut came too. He has travelled plenty, but he has never done a road trip, and a road trip is a different animal. No itinerary. No bookings. No agreed end. He was about to find out what nine days of that does to a horse.
First stop: Moab. Canyonlands. Then Dead Horse Point after dark, because Nicholas has decided he’s an astrophotographer now.
Except First There Were Calls#
So many calls.
Nicholas had work calls all morning. Then more work calls. Then a call about the calls. We did not leave the hotel until four in the afternoon, which for a bear who packed at dawn is a personal insult.
In fairness, it was too hot to be outside anyway. Everyone was wilting. Everyone except Chestnut, who thought the whole situation was fantastic, because Chestnut thinks everything is fantastic. That horse has never had a bad day in his life.
They grabbed sandwiches from a new place in town called Coyote Outpost so we could stay out late, and the owner threw in a tip with them: skip the pavement, take the dirt road. Go through Long Canyon.
I’m always down for an offroading adventure.
The road out of town runs right along the base of a wall that goes up forever. You drive with your nose almost touching the window.
The petroglyphs are carved into that wall, right at the side of the road, thousands of years old. No fence, no ticket, no gift shop. You pull over on the shoulder and there they are. Everybody stands in the gravel and looks straight up, which is exactly what people have been doing on this spot for a very long time.
Long Canyon#
Then the pavement ran out and the good part started.
Long Canyon Road climbs out of the river bottom on a dirt track that gets narrower and more enthusiastic the higher it goes. Loose rock. Big drops. Nobody else out there. This is the kind of road where nobody is quite sure we’re going to clear that rock, so you go for it and find out.
And then we got company.
They were everywhere out here. Once you spot the first one you can’t stop seeing them, parked on ledges no animal has any business standing on, entirely unbothered by any of it.
I would like it on record that I spotted one of them. I will accept a medal at any time.
That’s the La Sal Mountains out in the haze, which is a genuinely odd thing to see from the middle of a desert. Red rock in every direction and then snow-capable peaks over 12,000 feet (3,700 m) sitting there at the back of the frame like they wandered into the wrong photograph.
The best bit comes near the top, where an enormous slab has peeled off the wall and landed against the opposite side, and the road just goes underneath it. Nobody built that. It fell that way and somebody decided to drive under it.
We came out at the top right near the entrance to Canyonlands, exactly as promised. Best sandwich-shop advice we’ve ever been given, and I didn’t even have a sandwich.
Mesa Arch#
Canyonlands has an arch that sits right on the edge of a 500 foot (150 m) cliff, and the entire point of it is that it frames the whole park behind it. Buttes, canyons, the La Sals on the horizon, all of it lined up in a stone window.
Photographers queue here at sunrise. We showed up in the late afternoon with the place mostly to ourselves, which I consider the superior strategy, because it involved no early morning whatsoever.
Grand View Point#
Then we drove to the end of the road, where the mesa stops.
Grand View Point sits at about 6,080 feet (1,853 m) and it does what the name says with no imagination whatsoever. You walk out to the rim and the ground simply stops, and then there is nothing but canyon for a hundred miles.
It doesn’t photograph properly. Nothing this big does. Your eye keeps looking for something familiar to measure it against and there isn’t one.
Then you walk back to the car. That turned out to be the shape of most of this trip: drive somewhere, walk out to the edge of it, look, walk back.
Dead Horse Point#
We made it to the point for sunset.
Quick history, because the name deserves an explanation. Dead Horse Point is a mesa connected to the mainland by a neck of rock only about 30 yards wide. In the 1800s cowboys worked out that if you fence off the neck, you’ve got a natural corral, and they used it to hold wild mustangs while they picked out the ones worth keeping. The story goes that one band of horses was left up there behind the fence and died of thirst, in full view of the Colorado River 2,000 feet (600 m) below them.
So that’s a cheerful bit of local colour. It became a Utah state park in 1959, and if the view looks familiar, it’s because it’s the cliff Thelma and Louise drive off at the end of the film. The film says Grand Canyon. The film is lying.
There were other photographers up there, which turned out to be the good kind of crowd. Everybody spread out along the rim, tripods up, all pointed at the same thing.
We ended up hanging out with them for the rest of the night. Nicholas pulled up the timelapses he shot at Everest and that was the end of any further conversation about camera settings. Nothing beats a man showing strangers the Milky Way turning over the Himalaya on a phone screen in the dark. I was there for those, incidentally. Nobody asked about the bear.
The Actual Reason We Were There#
Ever since Nicholas got those Milky Way shots at Everest he’s decided this is a thing he does now, and early September in southern Utah is about as good as it gets for it. So the plan for this whole trip is simple: when the sky is clear, we shoot.
The sky was clear.
Here’s the composite he put together from that night. Two thousand feet of canyon, the Colorado doing its horseshoe, and the core of the galaxy standing straight up over the top of it.
There’s a bright streak across the middle of the frame. I would love to tell you that’s a meteor. It is almost certainly a Starlink satellite, which as a lifelong SpaceX bear I am contractually required to be delighted about, and which as a photographer’s bear is deeply annoying.
Then we drove back to the hotel and I took my usual spot in bed, because it had been a very long day for a bear who got up at dawn for a four o’clock departure.
One day down. Eight or so to go, and nobody has decided where we’re going yet.
I wonder how far we can get.