My White Pocket Trip

The last glimpse of sunlight from Overlook Trail during sunset as the sun sets behind the western mountains in Zion National Park

As I get more and more into my photography an idea that I have always continued to see around the photography world comes to mind, and that is if you want to make better photos not to focus on getting better equipment necessarily but instead getting out “There” and taking more photos. Especially spending more of your hard earned money on trips to new locals with magnificent landscapes rather then getting the newest gadget. While I have been working on the former, getting out and taking advantage of some of the dramatic landscapes we have in this country I probably wont get over my GAS ( Gear Acquisition Syndrome ) anytime soon. So it was that while I was looking for a new adventure to go on that my interest in photographing White Pocket in the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument of Northern Arizona began to grow. The pictures of the landscape look totally wild and the dark skies in the area would allow for some awesome Milky Way photography.

I started to research the area and look for write ups. I was confident that I could make it there in my Jeep Grand Cherokee on my own regardless of all the warnings I was reading online about people getting stuck in the deep sand on the way out there. While I was researching I came across a workshop put on by David Swindler and Ryan Smith through Action Photo Tours. I had been following both photographers work and the price was reasonable so I signed up. I told a friend about it and he told me he had already signed up for the same workshop but given a week previous to the one I signed up on, luckily he was able to work with David and switch dates to the same workshop I was going on, nice, now I had a photography buddy going on the same trip, I was going to definitely make the most out of this trip.

Now that there were two of us going I started planning a little differently and figuring out what other areas to shoot that we both wanted to shoot. The workshop started on a Monday for 3 days and 2 nights. I thought we could make a solid week out of this trip. Since we were driving to the workshop I started looking for campsites around the area and motels, we only needed one night in Kanab since we were camping at White Pocket for one night as well. As I was looking around I realized that Zion National Park was not to far away and we could easily drive there the day before and the next morning drive into Kanab for the workshop. Perfect, that gave us a sunset, Milky Way, and sunrise to potentially work with. Not to far away from Zion is Kanarraville and the Kanarra waterfalls, a landscape that I had seen in pictures many times and wanted to check out and it turned out so did my buddy. We decided that since the best time to shoot the falls was supposedly later in the day that rather then shoot it on the way out we would make that our last stop on the way back. My buddy had wanted to do some shooting in Moab and I felt like I wanted to give it a try as well under better weather after trying to shoot Moab in the nonstop rainstorm that followed me last year when I went,so we decided to make that our next stop after the workshop, staying there for 3 days and 3 Nights before hitting up Kanarra falls on the way home. So now we had a plan.

The Plan:

Drive out to Zion on Sunday and shoot Sunset, Milky Way, and Sunrise. Then Drive to Kanab for the White Pocket Workshop, Monday through Wednesday morning. After the workshop make the 4-5 hour drive up to Moab, giving us 3 chances to catch Sunset, Milky Way, and Sunrise. Drive back towards San Diego stopping for the night at Kanarraville to shoot the waterfalls for the day before finally making our way back to San Diego on Sunday.

First Stop : Zion National Park

Since I had visited Zion National Park last year when I was on my Moab Trip I was already familiar with the area and some of the best easily accessible shooting spots. I also had found a camping spot that I really liked last year and thought this would make a great spot again. The only doubt I had about Zion would be the crowds. It seemed almost every write up I read about Zion National Park also warns about disappointing crowds. I felt I had been lucky when visiting in October of 2018 having none of the issues I read about except for the amount of people I ran into on Angels Landing, I was not sure if the experience would be the same or worse. I am happy to report that I again ran into no crowd issues in September as well. It makes me wonder if just waiting until all the kids are back into school and therefore less adults are on vacation as well is the trick.

We arrived in Zion after the long drive from San Diego and quickly set up my 6 man tent for the two of us. Plenty of space and easy to set up. We went across the street to the market and grabbed a bite to eat and a sandwich to go knowing that we would be out shooting until late that night and therefore it was easier to just bring something with us. Our first spot to shoot was going to be the Overlook Trail in Zion. I had shoot it the year before at sunset, it was relatively easy to get to, and my buddy wanted to shoot in the same area as well.

The cars leaving light trails below as seen from the Overlook Trail in Zion National Park

We got lucky as we traveled through the Zion-Mount Carmel Tunnel and found parking in the parking lot to the right as soon as you emerged from the tunnel. In no time we have hiked the overlook and after a little scouting found the spots where we wanted to shoot from. I set up my gear and did some test shots to see what the composition would look like and then it was a waiting game for the sun to go down. The year previous in October the sun had set to left in the scene and I had really liked the composition. This year the sun was setting right in the middle of the scene and that dramatically changed the feeling. I ended up really liking how the sun was lighting up the valley just as it was dropping behind the mountains to the west and blended that with the sun star I was getting from the sun as it was going down.

It took a little longer then I expected to be able to shoot good car trails after the sun had dropped behind the mountains. I waited almost an hour before I was able to shoot the light trails from the cars driving up the road to the Zion-Mount Carmel Tunnel. As I was shooting the light trails my buddy had finished his shooting and was ready to go, he was ready to get down to our next spot at the Junction Bridge to shoot the Milky Way.  My buddy wanted to get down there and shoot the blue hour, he thought we wouldn’t make it in time and he was right. I forgot to figure in the hiking time back to the car. Looking at my time stamps it was probably about 36 minutes between my last shot at the top of Overlook Trail and my first shot at the Junction Bridge. Looking back at it now I would definitely say it would be to your advantage to try and shoot at blue hour for your foreground or shoot much later in the night when there is less traffic on the road behind you. It was very hard to find clear moments to shoot the foreground when there was not a car light lighting up the valley or a brake light throwing red light up against the canyon walls.

I set up a low level light below us under the bridge to give a little light to the scene in front of us. It seemed to work well without blowing out the scene. My only regret was the L bracket I had on my Sony A7R3 made it almost impossible to use my intervalometer while the camera was in a vertical position, so the longest exposure I ended up shooting while on that camera was 30 seconds, but as I was using my Sony 24mm F1.4 with it opened up to F1.4 , that gave me plenty of light and after shooting separate shorter shots for the sky to stack in Sequator and 6 (30) second shots for the foreground to stack in photoshop to diminish the amount of noise in the shot I was pretty happy with the end result.

The Milky Way rising up behind the Watchman in Zion National Park as seen from the junction bridge.

We had to originally planned on getting up to shoot sunrise and I had some ideas on where I wanted to shoot sunrise, one of them being down by the river looking up at Angels Landing but since you need to catch the bus back and forth to that point I felt like we would be squeezed for time since we had to make it to Kanab for our start to the workshop, plus the sky was very boring with no clouds in view so we decided to forgo that option and just take our time having breakfast and breaking down camp before moving on.