Martian Sundown

We’d been in the park all day — trails in the morning, a picnic in the middle of it — and nothing in the sky had suggested the evening was going to amount to anything. I’d picked the spot anyway. There’s a pull-off past a set of formations, and from there you can walk down and climb onto a rock that looks straight back along the road toward the visitor centre with the whole length of it laid out below you.

So I set up on the rock and waited on a sky that had given me no reason to.

It went red. Not orange, not pink — properly, deeply red, in a way that felt like the park showing off about its own name, and it held long enough for me to work. The place was busy that day, but nobody else was shooting that stretch at sunset.

That was my first visit. After we moved to St. George I came back many times, and I’ve never had a better evening there.

The title is about the rock. Valley of Fire has the darkest red sandstone I’ve seen anywhere in the Southwest — a genuinely different cast from the St. George country an hour east, which reads much more orange — and with a sky like that overhead and despite a road cutting through the middle, it stops looking like anywhere on this planet.