Chasing the Sun in Utah
What’s in a sunrise? A sunset?
We revel in their ephemeral beauty for fleeting moments each day. But beyond the pastel colors and artistry writ large, I believe they hold another intrinsic appeal: a new lens within which we can view the world. As the wavelengths of visible light stretch and shrink — hues of red, orange, yellow, blue and purple bleeding together — even everyday, mundane surroundings transform into their respective ideals.
Sunrises and sunsets change our perspective. No one is ever really the same, the sky’s equivalent of a fingerprint. The ordinary becomes altogether unique.
North Window at sunrise, Arches National Park. ©Greg Iacurci
The Milky Way over North Window, Arches National Park. ©Greg Iacurci
I spent nearly two weeks chasing the sun in Utah’s national parks, rising early to see first light on ancient arches and spires and hiking miles through the dark after seeing the day’s final embers glow in brilliant canyons and valleys. In Utah, where the landscape already has an ethereal, daydream quality, sunrises and sunsets can be downright sublime.
In short: They’re worth chasing.
Thousands of hoodoo spires catch fire at sunrise. Bryce Amphitheater, as seen from Bryce Point. ©Greg Iacurci
Sunset on the Fairyland Loop Trail, Bryce Canyon. Pastel colors of Bryce’s hoodoos bleed into each other in this long exposure. ©Greg Iacurci
The desert of southern Utah hosts an impressive concentration and diversity of natural marvels. I visited perhaps the best-known of them: Arches, Bryce, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef and Zion National Parks, collectively known as the “Mighty Five,” and tiptoed over the Arizona border to Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park.
The two-week road trip took me through iconic Western backdrops of freestanding red-rock monoliths and, in my estimation, some of the most beautiful and remote stretches of highway in America. In the span of a day, you might well confront soaring fins of Entrada sandstone, Grand Canyon-esque crevices gouged by meandering rivers or narrow slot canyons of polished rock the height of skyscrapers.
The Mitten Buttes and Merrick Butte are Monument Valley’s signature rock formations. ©Greg Iacurci
The Narrows in Zion National Park is one of America’s premier hikes. The “trail” is almost entirely in the Virgin River and sided by walls 1,000 feet tall. ©Greg Iacurci
The geology here is mind-bending, in both scale and age. Most features owe their origins to processes that began tens of millions of years ago, when dinosaurs roamed and present-day rock structures existed as mere sediment in tidal flats or the beds of ancient streams and oceans. Rafting down the Colorado River in Westwater Canyon, I saw among the oldest exposed rock layers in the world: a 1.75 billion-year-old tranche of black obsidian, almost half the age of the earth itself.
Dead Horse Point State Park at sunset. ©Greg Iacurci
It’s a mental quandary to consider how that same geological dynamism might mold the land in the future. What will these parks look like in 100,000 years? 100 million? 1 billion? Delicate Arch and Landscape Arch — treasures of Arches National Park — and countless others will long be reduced to rubble. Born of water and time, erosion will also prove their ultimate demise. “It will eventually succumb to the same forces that created it,” the National Park Service writes on a placard near Delicate Arch.
What new, picturesque creations might eventually blossom in their place?
Delicate Arch at sunrise, Arches National Park. ©Greg Iacurci
Angels Landing, Zion National Park. ©Greg Iacurci
Utah geology can be as comical as it is impressive, largely owing to whimsical descriptions of its prominent features: “hoodoos” in Bryce Canyon; “wrinkles,” “folds,” and “pockets” in Capitol Reef; “entrenched meanders” that gouge the cliffs in Canyonlands. Delicate Arch, a mainstay of Utah license plates, has even assumed nicknames like “Cowboy Chaps” and “Old Maid’s Bloomers.”
All are part of the Colorado Plateau, a massive, 150,000-square-mile region of high desert in the Southwest that hosts the largest concentration of national parks and monuments in the U.S., including the Grand Canyon.
Sun rays peek from behind blackened tree limbs in Arches National Park. ©Greg Iacurci
A tree perched atop a hoodoo on Bryce Canyon’s Fairyland Loop Trail. ©Greg Iacurci
In this “red rock country,” arches, buttes and mesas underwent a daily metamorphosis from deep purples to rusty reds and oranges and back again as the sun leapt over or crept under the horizon.
The sun could dazzle unexpectedly even in harsh midday light, its hot, spiky tendrils poking out from behind thousands of rainbow hoodoos, which stand like stoic, oversized peppermills, hammers and daggers; or framed by the gnarled limbs of lifeless juniper trees, black fossils scattered across the parched, barren earth; or nestled inside the hollow of an arch caressing the azure sky.
On one hike in Bryce Canyon — the Fairyland Loop Trail — it was as if the hills themselves had swallowed the sun, radiating impossible hues of yellow and orange, a logic-defying panorama from the mind of Dr. Suess.
The Milky Way over rock features in Bryce Canyon, a designated International Dark Sky Park. ©Greg Iacurci
The landscape was electric even when the sun retreated.
Utah’s Mighty Five are each International Dark Sky Parks. Clear nights brimmed with stellar fireworks, the Milky Way like an inky white arm reaching across the heavens, illuminated by the glow of faraway stars that may have died out long ago but whose light only now graces our eyes after hurtling trillions of miles through the vacuum of space.
The arch of North Window crisscrosses the inky streak of the Milky Way. ©Greg Iacurci
Utah ignited a part of my soul, one tucked away, lying dormant until those rare and treasured travel experiences stir it anew.
And I suppose that’s why we chase — whether it be a sunrise, a sunset, or any aspect of globetrotting. Those fleeting yet immutable moments of shock, awe, wonder — there’s nothing quite like it.
Switchbacks along the Navajo Loop Trail in Bryce Canyon. Sun rays attempt to penetrate the narrow passage, lined with colorful limestone. ©Greg Iacurci