Bajo la Luna

Cathedral Valley is one of the most remote places on this site. The road in crosses the Fremont, and we were lucky in that nothing was flowing the day we went, but there are still stretches out there that would bottom out most vehicles. I was in an F150 with the clearance for it and our friends were in a Suburban, and we took our time and got through without incident. It took hours.

The plan was astrophotography — Temple of the Moon with the Milky Way standing up behind it, which is what people go out there for. By the time we had everything set it was obvious the clouds weren’t going to break, and watching a good plan die is what produced the better one: put a vehicle on the road below the Temple and let the brake lights light the rock.

My friend Dalton drove my truck. We coordinated over walkie-talkies and it took three passes to get the timing right, with the shutter open for thirty seconds while he came through and the red washing up the base of the Temple as he slowed. We never left the designated road.

I’d tried a version of this once before, at Doe Run Lake back when we lived in Kentucky. It came out better here, and I don’t think that’s anything to do with me.

We had full camping gear along and made dinner out there — my wife and I had ramen — with the BLM land that starts just past the Temples as our fallback if we didn’t fancy the drive. In the end we drove back to a hotel near the park entrance that night.

Sun Scorched is from earlier the same evening — the Temple of the Sun at sunset, before the clouds closed in and this one turned into brake lights instead of stars.