Last night’s post was really lame, but I was incredibly tired, so I forgive myself.

This morning my dad and I woke up at a quarter to 5 in order to get out to Arches National Park and hike up to our vantage point overlooking Delicate Arch. And, as the sun started to rise, the bane of my enjoyment of national parks appears. No less than 15 people are swarming over the arch I wanted to shoot before the sun is even over the horizon. Standing around it, laying underneath it, sitting down and leaning against it. Of course, I was well out of earshot from them, seeing as I was using a telephoto for the shot. So, we waited, and waited. We were there for a good two hours and I never could get the shot I wanted. The few decent shots I may have gotten occurred when people would wander “behind” the arch (at least from my perspective they were behind it), hiding their bright white or yellow t-shirts from my lens.

And to be honest, they weren’t the worst folks that I encountered at Arches (and several of the other national parks). At one point, we stumbled upon a tour group of 50 sitting and laying around under one of the more popular arches, only moving once a fellow photographer approached them and asked them to (after having waited 20 minutes for them to move off on their own). Then there’s the couple who couldn’t walk half a mile without needing to stop at the end of the short hike (again, directly underneath a very popular arch) and consume their bag of Cheetos for half an hour. (I never did get my shot at that location.) The lack of etiquette and common sense at how to avoid ruining a visit for other people is just astounding. And it isn’t just at Arches; when I was in Rocky Mountain National Park, a man felt the need to approach to within five feet of a trio of big horn sheep in order to get a nice up close picture of them, much to the annoyance of a group of 30 tourists he stepped in front of and myself, since he happened to fill most of the frame in my viewfinder.

Oh well though, enough ranting. After Arches this morning, we headed to the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park, having been to the Islands in the Sky district on Tuesday afternoon. It was a completely different environment than we’d seen then. Well, not completely different, it was still a desert with rock formations. But the formations were totally different. Islands of the Sky was mesas and buttes, Needles was mostly spires and mushroom looking formations. Very cool and unworldly.

About 2pm, we hopped back in the car for our trip back north to Hill AFB, meeting my brother, his wife and a couple of his friends at Rooster’s for a little food and some time hanging out.

Tomorrow, picture processing and hopefully, Hill’s Air and Space Museum.

Travel Distance: 409 miles