Desert Hiking Photo Galleries
We've taken a few photographs on our hikes across the slickrock desert of the Colorado Plateau over the years. The desert is the main subject, but we don't consider our work to really be landscape photography. That's something done with specific intent by experts, and we do something else: we try to show what it was like to be there.
Photos
Most of these photos were taken while hiking in or near Arches National Park. We didn't have a 4-wheel drive vehicle when we lived out there, and we were too poor to risk taking our old van on very many gravel roads, so we went hiking primarily in Arches. We can think of worse things.
We Like to Hike in the Summer Heat
The desert travel guides and survival manuals all advise visitors to avoid strenuous activity, such as hiking, during the summer months. If you do visit in the summer, they recommend going on hikes during the cooler parts of the day: morning and evening. And they're right; that's the smart thing to do.
Personally, Don and I like nothing better than hiking off-trail across the desert slickrock in the shimmering heat and light of a mid-summer afternoon. We like the silence. We like the smell of hot juniper and stone and dust...
We also drink plenty of water and Gatorade.
It's a desert. It's supposed to be hot. We enjoy the heat and the single-digit humidity level. It makes our bones feel good to hike across the Navajo sandstone on a clear summer afternoon when it's 115 degrees in the shade, and absolutely silent. We usually start hallucinating the music from Looney Tune cartoons sometime around 4:00 in the afternoon when we're half-way back from our hike. It's usually uphill, somehow, and by that time the sunlight has weight, and mass...
NOTE: No Cryptobiotic Crust Was Harmed While Taking These Pictures
We hike freestyle across expanses of bare sandstone, and follow the washes when the slickrock runs out in order to avoid damaging the fragile cryptobiotic crust that holds the desert in place. No crypto was harmed while taking these pictures. We're very careful about that.