I have a confession to make.  I have put myself into a number of mental boxes over the years, and sometimes they can be hard to break out of.  One such box is that Picture of the Week should be just a single picture.  I break that rule from time to time, but it’s generally the exception and not the rule.  I do that because I feel like I forces me to choose and share only my best.  I also tend to only share three images from single place.  There are a number of reasons for this, and in the fall I tend to drag this out to six, but again, that’s rare.  All that said, I have number of images from our trip to Utah that I really want to share and talk about, starting first with Capitol Reef National Park here today.  Rather than drag all this out for weeks and weeks, I’ve elected to do a series of three photo essays, from different spots in Utah.  In the past when I’ve done this, I’ll just comment here, and let the pictures stand on their own, but this go around I’m going to add some comments about each of the images, under the image itself, and see how that plays.

Now, with that off my chest, lets talk about Capitol Reef National Park.  Back in 2019 when I first visited this park, I commented that it was then my favorite national park in the US, and I would probably still say that’s true today.  That interesting thing about the park, much like the Great Smoky Mountains here in my own backyard, it would be easy enough to drive through the park and not catch what’s so amazing about it.  To really ‘see’ it – you’ve got to get out of your car, and spend some time walking around, or even just pulling over and staring at it for a bit.  It is one of those parks that reveals itself to you over time.  Well, on this my second trip to the park, Holly and I committed multiple days to the park to let it really soak in, and honestly I can’t wait to go back for more.

Let’s talk about the pictures.  As usual, the picture above is my favorite, but also as usual I have a really hard time picking favorites (which is why you’re getting more than one image for the next three weeks!).  The road in the picture is the Scenic Drive, with part of the famous orchards visible at the very end of the road as you’re seeing it here.  This particular view caught my eye one afternoon as Holly and I were leaving the area and I decided I needed to come back for sunset one evening.  The day I shot this, the light turned really nice for a bit, as you can see above, but then the clouds blocked up the horizon at the actual sunset, and so no real color developed.  In any case, I liked all the dramatic lighting just fine.

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–Dan Thompson

This next image is another scene that just happened to catch my eye as Holly and I were driving around.  This is what the base of many of those cliffs in the scene above look like.  As the sun was setting on this particular day, it cast a beautiful soft glow on these rocks, making the red / orange rocks turn a very pink color.  I loved all the light and shadows in this image.

When I first visited Capitol Reef, I called this landscape the craziest landscape I’d ever seen.  Since then, I committed a fair amount of time to trying to figure out what those – things – are, and frankly I came up a bit empty handed.  I ended up taking the image I took in 2019 into the visitor center and asking, “what the heck are those things??”.  The ranger replied that they refer to them as the cinnamon rolls!  Well, Holly and I happened to find a bakery in town that served AMAZING cinnamon rolls, so we bought some and went and ate them while looking at these cinnamon rolls (if I say that one more time I’m going to have to find some to eat now).  The challenging thing about them, according to the ranger, is that their look changes as you get close to them, so the spot I had found was evidently the best place to view them.  This go around, however, I’d brought a much longer lens and could capture the detail I really wanted the first time.  There is a hike up to where you can get a better look at them, and next time I visit the park I intend to do it.