Best. Sunrise. Ever.
Canyonlands National Park

These folks know something I was about to learn: That watching the sunrise through Canyonlands National Park‘s Mesa Arch is a magical show. So rather than deconstruct sunshine, I’ll just show you how beautiful it was to see.

You want to watch that orange glow and what it does to the underside of the arch.

On top of the arch

Here she comes

Add it to your bucket list!

I headed to Grand View Point after–to see where I might do my night shoot. It would be a day I’d visit two National Parks in the day and… both again in the night. But I only hiked in one because this heat is no joke.

With less infrastructure than other parks, Canyonlands National Park is 337,598 acres of wild.  Enacting a dream of sharing pristine and untouched wilderness, Bates Wilson wooed government officials with the land’s features and liquored them up good and well before acquiring the jurisdiction of a huge portion of land to the National Park Service.  He fought against “pampering” developments within the park and tried to minimize any and all means of human influence, including a ban on naming any landform after a human.  This was in the 1960’s.

As admirable as this perspective is, there were many before him revering the land–like 10,000 years before.  The pictographs and petroglyphs on the Canyonlands rock reveal nomadic hunter-gatherers came through from 8,000 BCE to 500 BCE.

Like many of the parks I am touring, Canyonlands National Park merits days of exploration to uncover a portion of its wonder.  My visit would focus on a small area.