The World We Knew Is Gone - Utah.
On September 9th, 2019 I left for the final photo trip for The World We Knew Is Gone. I flew into Salt Lake City, rented an SUV, and began a loop around the southern half of Utah. Back at the end of July, nearly all of my equipment had been stolen out of my car during a travel shoot in San Francisco, right at the beginning of the largest work project Vision & Verve had ever done, and insurance refused to pay for a dime of it. I thought it was the end my company, the end of my career, and the end of this project. But my mom was generous enough to step in and loan me the money to buy back the equipment I needed to continue. So this was my first shoot with all the new equipment, including my new Canon 5D Mark IV, which had a lot of new features that made shoots like this much easier.
The first stop on my trip was Fantasy Canyon, a place I was really excited to shoot, because it is so bizarre looking, but also it’s an incredibly underrated location because it’s so far out of the way from anything. I had to drive for several hours down dusty roads meant only for oil tankers for all the fracking wells throughout the area. The place itself is only a few acres, but it’s so dense with strange rock formations, and I basically had the place all to myself.
I slept in my SUV in the parking lot of Fantasy Canyon, and kept waking up to notice the moon setting, creating more and more dramatic shadows amongst the stars. I figured it looked too good to miss, so I got out of the car and threw on the suit for some more slow shutters with the night sky.
The next day I drove to Moab and spent the day hiking trails all throughout Arches National Park. Even though the park was full of amazing views, it was too crowded everywhere to try and get any spacesuit photos without anyone in them. So in the late afternoon I drove to nearby Canyonlands National Park. I got some photos from Grand View Point Overlook as the sun set, but it didn’t quite capture the majesty of what I was seeing. I stayed until after dark, and noticed a lightning storm happening on the other side of the canyon. The moon was out, illuminating the night sky along with the tiniest glimmer of daylight. I hopped back in my spacesuit, set up my camera for a slow shutter, and stood as still as possible, hoping that at least one of the photos would catch the perfect strike of lightning from the storm in the distance. After roughly 30 minutes of attempts I had the shot I was looking for.
That night I hiked out in the dark down a trail leading to a canyon facing east that would be perfect for a sunrise shot. I used my sun tracker app to predict where the sun would come up and how I could frame the shot. Luckily there was enough moonlight to see what I was in for. I hiked back to my SUV to get a few hours of sleep before making the hike again in the morning during blue hour.
Once I reached the cliff edge of the canyon, I realized I had one little problem. To get to the ledge I planned to stand on from the ledge I had the camera set up on, there was about a 4 foot jump across and about a 1,000 foot fall down if I slipped. The gap is just below the frame in this shot (and didn’t look nearly as scary as it was in real life even when it was in frame. But ya gotta do what ya gotta do to get the shot. So every time I’d have to go from posing to checking the camera, I’d have to leap across the gap and hope with all my might that I wouldn’t accidentally slip.
Ended up with one of my favorite shots from the series. Particularly happy about that diffuse cloud that softened the light but kept a bright warm glow.
Another location I had been looking forward to visiting was Goblin Valley State Park. It was one of the first places on my list because I remember it so distinctly from Galaxy Quest where Tim Allen fought the rock monster. It had red dirt, tall strange hoodoos, and looked so alien that it had literally been used as an alien planet.
One problem I hadn’t anticipated though was the size of the hoodoos. They were each so big that it was surprisingly difficult to get a good sense of scale of the place. Especially since when you were eye level with the hoodoos, they engulfed so much of your view, it wasn’t easy to tell you were completely surrounded by them. I knew my best bet to capture the scope of the place was to hop on top of the hoodoos so you could see how expansive they were, but they were so tall that it wasn’t easy to find some short enough for me to climb on in the spacesuit. And it especially wasn’t easy to find some close enough together for me to set my camera up on one and stand on another, and getting them to line up into a nice composition.
It ended up being one of the most frustrating shoots of the series, because the location looked so perfect if all you were doing was getting landscapes, but as soon as a human was involved, the whole scale and composition got tricky as hell. I got what I could and called it a day, just as it started to rain.
After that, I spent a day “resting” in Bryce Canyon National Park. I hiked through some of the most popular trails, saw the iconic sights, and kept an eye out for anywhere I could get away from folks to get spacesuit photos, but the park was too packed and the trails were too busy. So next I drove to Cedar Breaks National Monument in southwestern Utah. I found a spot off one of the only trails in the park that I could sneak away and get some photos of the cliffs & canyons. By happenstance, at the time I was there, there was a wildifre in one of the canyons, and the spot I found faced the fire neatly. Throughout the entire series, I had been making a point to avoid vegetation as much as possible, so that the landscapes looked even more lifeless and alien. But seeing as how this would be the second to last photo for the series, it felt appropriate to finally include some of the burnt up trees and new growth vegetation. I stayed in that spot and got as many variations of the shot as I could before the sun had set.
After I left Cedar Breaks, my next stop was Zion National Park. It was one of the places my ex-fiancé and I were thinking about going for our honeymoon. Because of a rockslide several months before, lots of the trails were closed off, leaving primarily the two most popular trails, meaning that spacesuit photos weren’t really going to be an option. So instead I just enjoyed my time there, including a morning hike up to Angel’s Landing, and an afternoon hike down The Narrows as far as my soggy boots could take me.
The last stop for my trip and for the series was going to be at Great Basin National Park. Ever since I wrote the short film, I knew exactly how I wanted the series to end, and had a crystal clear visual of what I wanted it to look like. I had been avoiding showing any water and as little vegetation as possible throughout the series, because I wanted it to look like I was on a constant search through lifeless landscapes for a safe and welcoming place to stop. So I wanted the final image to feature me sitting at the shore of an alpine lake with a line of pine trees on the opposite end of the lake, and the base of a tall barren mountain. It would be the only photo where I was relaxing, the only photo without the helmet, the only photo where I appeared at peace.
I spent hours upon hours doing as much research as possible to find the right spot online. Including a ridiculous amount of time on Google Earth to check and recheck that the composition would line up precisely how I was hoping. My best choice was Stella Lake at Great Basin National Park. I arrived with plenty of time before sunset, and took as many variations as I could with the different lighting, but none of it felt perfect. So I went back to my car to sleep for the night and try again in the morning. When I woke up, it was so cloudy I assumed I wasn’t going to get any sunlight I was hoping for, but decided to try anyways. While I was taking my time making my way back to Stella Lake, the clouds parted in the most perfect way, turning the whole sky red, creating the most gorgeous lighting for the short possible. One problem though, I was still a mile away from the lake and not wearing the spacesuit. By the time I reached the lake, the red sky had gone, but all the clouds had too.
I had to realize I wasn’t going to be able to get the perfect shot like I had hoped, and just appreciate the fact that I was at the end of an 18-month journey that had sent me thousands of miles all across the Southwest. I was completing the largest, most ambitious project I had ever attempted, and just sit with the fact that I was a changed person for it. That’s when I managed to get the shot I was after, the look of peace I hoped for.
I thought the perfect conclusion to the project would be to climb the mountain in the background of the last shot, and sit up there writing some thoughts about the project. I took all my gear back to the car, changed out of my spacesuit, and packed a backpack for a day hike. Took me about an hour and a half to get up past the tree line, but one thing I hadn’t expected was that most of the trail from there to the peak was on the opposite side of the mountain, facing the Great Basin.
That day I had the unfortunate luck to be dealing with winds in excess of 60 miles an hour. Every last gust of wind heading east from Nevada was surging up that mountain so fiercely that I would have to stand at a 45 degree angle just to stay upright. For at least two hours I was determined to not let it defeat me. Someone had created small rock shelters every 50 yards or so to shield from the wind. I’d spend 5 minutes fighting the wind in order to reach the next shelter, then have to spend 15 minutes resting and catching my breath from fighting so hard for every step. I got within a quarter mile of the peak (the part of the mountain directly above my head in the photo), but realized that on the rest of the path leading up there were no more rock shelters to hide from the wind. At this point it was about 4 hours since I had left and I was utterly exhausted, and it occurred to me that the only way back was the same way I had come. I was not up for that fight again. So I did the only foolish thing that made any sense to me, I left by going straight down the mountain.
I spent the next couple of hours leaping down from one giant loose boulder to the next, far away from any logical or safe path. Cannot thank my hiking boots enough for their support in helping me avoid getting a sprained ankle that surely would’ve been my demise. 90 minutes and two bruised knees later, I made it to back to the opposite side of Stella Lake, where I proceeded to collapse and take a long nap. When I woke up, a cold front had made its way to the mountain and I could tell it was going to snow soon. I got back in my car, drove back to Salt Lake City for my flight and get everything ready for my first solo show in just a few days to finally show the world what I had created.
The last photo I took was the last photo in the series, and the last time I’m ever going to wear that spacesuit. I had completed what I set out to do, and got out of it just what I was hoping to. I had found a new world, one I had built inside myself.
