Magnificent Moab!

Posted on June 21, 2018 by Matt Hunt

Okay, let’s get caught up here! Sorry, I have a tough time keeping up with writing blogs! Much more exciting to put together videos!

After the quick stop in Fruita to ride Horsethief Bench, I continued on to Moab! I came for Outerbike. Originally I was going to try out bikes that I was interested in buying, but since I got my YT Jeffsy back in December (25% off, couldn’t pass it up), I was just trying out bikes for fun!

Before all of that, I went on a hike to see an arch that I didn’t get to see on my first trip to Moab; Corona Arch. This is outside of the National Park, but in my opinion is just as good, if not better, than anything in the park!

The goal was to get a good sunset, but when I started the hike, the sky was filled with clouds. A lot of people were returning from the arch, and by the time I was actually standing underneath it, I was the only one there! Not only that, but the clouds broke just enough to let the sun shine through and provide some brilliant light for some incredible photos!

I hiked back in the dark a very happy man!

Day 1 of Outerbike took me to the Navajo Rocks loop on the Yeti SB5+. I only rode half of the loop to try to save some energy for the rest of the weekend. It was a fun trail, with nothing too difficult. A good warmup in Moab! After returning to the Bar M trails where the event was located, I picked up an Ibis Mojo HD4 and hit a trail I had on my list: Sidewinder. Unlike any other trail in Moab, this one is almost completely smooth, and full of flow & speed! It was so much fun!

Day 2 was Mag 7 on the Giant Trance Advanced 2! All of it! Prior to this trip I had reached out to another YouTuber from Grand Junction, R.C. of Outdoor Gold. I was actually looking to meet up with him to ride Horsethief Bench, but as it turned out he had planned a group ride at Mag 7 on the same day Outerbike took me there. Admittedly, I didn’t communicate well on meeting up, but as luck would have it, I saw him and his group just heading out as the shuttle arrived at the trailhead. I was able to catch up with them for the start of the most epic day ever on the bike! My left calf cramped twice, I hit drops and other technical features unlike anything I had ever done before, I ran out of water, I walked… a lot… but it was SO MUCH FUN! Luckily these guys offered to take me back to Outerbike, otherwise I would have had to cut the ride short and miss out on Gold Bar Rim & Portal… which was THE trail I really wanted to ride on the Mag 7! With extreme exposure on the edge of a cliff, Portal is not for the faint of heart! Riders have fallen to their death on this trail, and there are signs along the way warning everyone of just that. There were several spots where we all got off the bikes and walked, and there is no shame in that!

Day 3 of Outerbike took us to Captain Ahab, and I was riding an Evil The Calling. This was another trail that I was super excited about, and after tackling a couple double black diamonds the day before, I was feeling very confident. Um… maybe a bit TOO confident! I ended up crashing twice, and one of those crashes left me with a broken wrist! It was one of the carpal bones, the trapezium. A small 5mm fracture, and initially I didn’t even know it. I finished the ride, and in fact bossed the most rowdy section of the whole trail with my wrist already broken! It honestly didn’t hurt that much for the remainder of that ride, but afterward I was feeling it!

I had originally planned on riding Slickrock the following day, but with my hand in so much pain, I skipped it and just toured the La Sal Mountain Loop Road, and flew the drone.

It wasn’t actually until 2 weeks later that I found out my trapezium had a fracture! Since then, I’ve been in a cast for 4 weeks, a brace for another 2, and the fracture didn’t even heal! It is a nonunion, and apparently there is no solution from here. I just get to have a little bone fragment chillin in my wrist for the rest of my life! I still have some pain, mainly around the thumb, which is from it being stuck in that cast for a month. The area of the fracture isn’t tender to the touch, and the pain that I was feeling with lifting objects with my palm facing up has gone away. Nonetheless, I’m having to ease back into mountain biking, as all of the muscles surrounding the thumb, and the PIP joint of the thumb, will hurt moderately bad during and immediately after riding.

Anyway, check out the whole series of videos from this trip here:

Delicate Arch: A Utah Landmark

Posted on September 10, 2016 by Matt Hunt

On my trip through the National Parks of southern Utah, there was one shot in particular that I was after. I wanted to get a shot of the milky way through Delicate Arch. Delicate Arch is symbolic of Utah; in fact it appears on their license plate. Formed of Entrada Sandstone, the arch opening stands 64 feet tall and 45 feet wide. It is the largest free-standing arch in Arches National Park.

Delicate Arch is not one that cannot be driven right up to and seen with a short walk. It requires a fairly strenuous hike of 3 miles round trip, with a 480 foot elevation gain. In the summer heat, this is made even more strenuous, and there isn’t a whole lot of shade along the trail! Since I wanted to be there for sunset as well, I completed this hike at probably the worst possible time of day, the late-afternoon, when it was well in excess of 100 degrees! The sign at the beginning of the trail recommends bringing 2 liters of water with you for this hike. I had finished off 1 liter by the time I reached the top.

Once I was at the top, however, I was able to sit in the shade and cool down, and it wasn’t bad at all. That’s the advantage of the dry heat! In spite of the heat and the relatively demanding hike, it was pretty crowded up there, but I fully expected that.

Even with the crowds, you can get a good angle on the arch from several different spots, so it’s not really an issue. The biggest issue is that everyone and their mother wants to get a picture of themselves standing underneath the arch! There was actually a line, and one at a time they’d walk out, take a few pictures, then the next person or group would come in.

Once the sun began to get lower in the sky, however, there was one brave photographer who yelled across the way for those people to clear the arch and give everyone 10 seconds for a clear shot!

This is another one of the top shots I was after on this trip, and one that had been two years in the making, ever since I was originally set to spend 4 weeks in Grand Junction, CO, just 2 hours away. The only thing that would make it better is if the La Sal Mountains had snow on the peaks! I guess I’ll just have to go back in the early spring to get that shot!

Later on as the shadows were creeping up on the arch, and the light at the top of the arch was even more brilliant, I took it upon myself to yell across the way and ask for another 10 seconds to shoot!

You see the difference in the color there as the sun gets lower, and the light turns to a more brilliant orange. I just wish the arch was sitting a little higher, or there wasn’t anything blocking the sun at the bottom of it at this point. Nonetheless, that was quite a beautiful moment, and in this scenario, a completely cloud-free sky was another thing I had been hoping for.

The lack of clouds was absolute requirement after the sun set if I were to get the #1 shot I came for with the milky way! After the sun went down, the crowd slowly started to die down, and for a moment I thought it would just be myself and one other photographer there to shoot the milky way, but by the time darkness had set in, half a dozen or more photographers showed up.

To get this shot, I had planned on doing two separate exposures. One for the milky way itself, with a high ISO to take in more light. I then wanted to do a separate exposure for the arch at a lower ISO for less noise, lit by my flashlight. I made sure the other photographers were okay with me light painting for a couple minutes, because I was still doing a long exposure for this. If you light paint on a high ISO, you really only need a flash.

Back on the computer, I combined the two images in Photoshop. Since I’m not that skilled with the various methods of cutting parts of layers out, I did this all by hand when zoomed way in. In addition, my camera creates this odd noise on long exposures with these little purple, red, blue and yellow lines. I went through all the dark spots on the foreground with the spot removal tool and took literally thousands of these little specs out by hand! This one image has about 4 hours of labor in it, but the end result was well worth it!

Want a print of this image? Visit my Etsy store to order! I got an 18 x 24 inch canvas of this printed for my wall at home, and it looks great! Just contact me if you want to order any other images that are not in my current inventory on Etsy!

Canyonlands All-Nighter

Posted on August 12, 2016 by Matt Hunt

There were two places I wanted to photograph in Canyonlands National Park, which was about an hour drive from Moab. One involved the Milky Way, the other involved sunrise, so I just planned to stay out there all night, rather than drive an hour back just take a quick nap, then turn around and go right back to where I came from!

My first stop was at False Kiva. This trail is not marked on any park map, but if you just Google it, you’ll find it. The trailhead is not officially marked by any plaque, or even a parking area, but the trail itself is easy to see. The reason for this is that the park doesn’t want thousands and thousands of visitors to this place. I can’t find a whole lot of information on it, and I believe it’s because there’s a lot they don’t really know about it. I do know that it is an archaeological site, so they are likely still trying to figure out more about it. A kiva is basically a wall of stones in a circle. They could be used to live in, or have spiritual ceremonies. This one is called False Kiva because its origin and exact use are unknown.

I had seen good shots of this location at sunset, as well as at night with the Milky Way, so I wanted to get both. I set out about two hours before sunset. All of the info I had read put this hike at about an hour. That would give me plenty of time. Most of the trail was well-defined, flat, and easy. There was one section of slick rock where it was difficult to determine where to go, but I could see where cairns once stood, and as I went I stacked these rocks back up to make new cairns so that I could find my way back in the dark!

The hard part comes at the end of the hike, where you actually descend below the alcove where False Kiva is, then pass it, then have to climb back up to it. That brought out some sweat! Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that when I was eating dinner prior to leaving Moab, I checked the temperature and it said 109!

When I got to the site, I noticed a metal box sitting behind a big rock. I opened it and found some information on the site, some rules, pens & a notepad that a lot of other hikers & photographers had signed. I went ahead and signed that notepad myself!

Sunset was beautiful from this spot! The last light hit those cliffs and turned them red, and the hazy air allowed the horizon to generate a beautiful orange hue, while further up the sky remained blue. Gorgeous!

Okay, I have a confession to make. I screwed up on the Milky Way shots! First of all, I didn’t realize how far to the left the Milky Way would be as it first became visible, so I had to move my camera from this spot, and I really didn’t like that angle. Also, what I should have done was take a shot of the canyon prior to full darkness so that I could create a two-image composite with a visible canyon, and visible Milky Way in the sky. I did not, and without that, you really can’t discern any part of the canyon. Add to that the fact that most of the sky became obscured with cloud cover after the sun had set.

Being at this place… wow. I was a little bit anxious, to be honest. I was looking forward to getting back to my car! I was a bit worried about finding my way back in the dark, and it just felt odd being out there all by myself. The only sign of any human life out there were the planes flying overhead. It was a little eerie, so when it appeared the clouds were going to be around for a while, I decided I didn’t want to wait any longer, and around 11 pm I decided to hike back.

I made it back to my car without any issues, and from there took the very short drive to the Mesa Arch parking area, where I would try to get some sleep in while waiting for morning. I wasn’t quite sure what time I needed to get up and hike to the arch, as I had heard people start getting set up HOURS before sunrise to get a good spot! I set an alarm for 3 am, but to be honest, I barely slept any.

The sky ended up clearing not too long after I got there. I did get to enjoy quite a few meteors, and a seriously dark night sky, with a bright Milky Way clearly visible. This was pretty amazing! I just love being out in the middle of nowhere looking at the stars on a clear night.

The first car pulled up about 2 hours before sunrise. That was my que, time to get my stuff and hike out to the arch! Those two French guys would beat me there, and in fact I got a little lost on the trail trying to find it! The trail is a loop, and I ended up doing the loop, missing the part where you turn off the loop to go to the arch! Eventually I found it, and was glad to find they weren’t set up where I wanted to be anyway!

Slowly but surely other photographers started trickling in. We didn’t like what we saw in the sky… clouds! There was a very brief period where the sun had a clear part to shine through, and the shutters went off like machine guns!

There was still plenty of room for me to take the camera off the tripod and get some different angles, so I took advantage of that. The best use of the D500’s 10 frame per second speed for me is handheld HDR bracketing! I can fire off three consecutive images with very minimal movement of the camera, allowing them to easily line up in Lightroom later. I did a lot of that on this trip.

After just a few minutes, the sun was gone behind the clouds. I wondered if that would be it, but I wasn’t even thinking about leaving just yet! I was taking a close look at the clouds, and figured there would be a chance of the sun poking back out once it got higher in the sky. I wasn’t sure how much orange glow would be on the bottom of the arch at that point, but I sat and waited. Others did not, including those two French guys who were there first. They gave up, packed up and left! BIG mistake, because the clouds cleared 10 minutes later, and this happened:

YES! This is what I came here for! That orange glow on the bottom of Mesa Arch is just incredible, and you know what? I’m glad we had those clouds, because it adds some interest to the rest of the sky in the photos! I left Mesa Arch feeling great… really tired… but great, knowing that I had gotten the shots I came here for!

Before going back to Moab, I stopped by Dead Horse Point State Park. It was right off the road that went to Canyonlands anyway, and I figured morning would be a good time to be there. To be honest, I’d rather have been there earlier, but that wouldn’t have been worth missing the magic at Mesa Arch!

There’s actually a poster of this place hanging on the wall in our office right behind me where I stand at my computer. However, it’s just a view of the canyon, so I didn’t know about all these Juniper trees along the ledge! I was happy to see that, as I’m always looking for some foreground interest to add to these vast landscape photos. It definitely makes for a more interesting photo!

I couldn’t leave without doing my signature selfie, though!

I was SO tired at that point, but it was all worth it! I got back to Moab, and after eating some breakfast, hopped into bed!