Mjöllnir

On the way home from Salt Lake City I built in a side trip to Bryce, which meant a pre-dawn start and a long dark drive to be standing on the rim before the sun got there.

In the parking lot, still in the dark, I set the camera down on the hood of the car and it slid straight off and hit the pavement. Fortunately, the L-bracket took the brunt of the impact, leaving the camera unscathed – a lucky break that allowed this adventure to continue.

Because the Navajo Loop switchbacks were under snow, getting down off the rim took a lot longer than the map suggests — short steep pitches, packed ice under fresh powder, and a drop-off on the outside of every turn.

By the time I’d found an outcropping worth setting up on, other photographers had started coming down the same trail and picking their own spots nearby. Nobody had planned it. We stood around in the cold in the half hour before anything happened, talking quietly the way people do when it’s early and dark and everybody is there for the same reason.

When the sun finally came, it came through a thin screen of cloud that took the hardness out of it. The sky went soft — pink and purple over the red-orange of Thor’s Hammer and the hoodoos around it — and the light stayed warm without turning harsh. It was close to what I’d hoped for when I built in the detour.