Sun Scorched

By the time we reached Cathedral Valley that afternoon I’d had enough of the road, and then the two Temples came into view and all of that stopped mattering immediately. They are enormous fins of rock standing up out of an otherwise empty valley floor with no apparent reason for being there, which is most of what makes them fascinating.

We parked over by the Temple of the Moon and walked back toward the Sun, getting to within about seventy yards of it, which was as close as we went. The scale is hard to convey in a frame with nothing familiar in it; there’s a sliver of road visible at the base here and that’s the only thing offering any sense of how big this is. I took a few phone snaps with my truck in shot that do the job far better.

Wanting the sunstar as the light went, I drove back around to this vantage — the road out toward Glass Mountain, which is a mound of gypsum crystals heaped together and worth a stop in its own right. Once the sun had dropped we spent a while down there shooting details of the crystals with what light was left coming through them.