Photographing Mesa Arch at Sunrise

Everyone who has seen a photograph of Mesa Arch has seen the same photograph: the underside of the arch lit orange, the White Rim below, the La Sals on the horizon. The walk in is seven tenths of a mile on an easy grade. None of the difficulty is in the hike.

Getting there in the dark

We slept up on the mesa, about two miles north of the Mesa Arch parking area, near the Green River Overlook — almost certainly at Willow Flat, though my friend was driving and I never saw the fee envelope. No tent — I was traveling with my Swiss friend and we both cowboy camped straight onto the rocky ground, sleeping bag and open sky. After the PCT, sleeping on the ground is just what you do.

That proximity is the whole reason the morning worked: two miles of road at 3:45am rather than the drive in from Moab. If you want to do it properly, the campground up there is Willow Flat — the only one in the Island in the Sky district. Twelve sites, first come first served, no water, and it fills through spring and autumn. Book nothing, arrive early, bring your own water.

A kit fox passed by in the night, curious about its new neighbors. I had no idea what it was at the time and only worked it out later. Sleeping out up there means company, and that is rather the point of sleeping out.

Sleeping up on the mesa also sidesteps Moab. It is the nearest town of any size and the obvious place to base yourself, but it is an expensive one — a bed there costs real money in season, and you would still be driving in before 4am to use it.

You need to be paid in to the park to be there at all. There are several ways to do that; I carry the America the Beautiful annual pass, which covers the whole national park system for a year.

I was at the parking area around 4am. The hike in is seven tenths of a mile on an easy grade with one slight hill — genuinely nothing, but you are walking it in full dark, so bring a headlamp. And bring more clothing than the daytime forecast suggests. The desert gets properly cold before sunrise and you are going to be standing still for an hour once you arrive.

Why 4am, when the walk takes fifteen minutes

This is the part the other guides underplay. You are not arriving early because the hike is long. You are arriving early because of the deluge of people who turn up in the final minutes before the light.

The genuinely good ground in front of the arch holds maybe ten tripods. That is the entire prime shooting position. Get there at 4am and you choose your spot — which end, how low, what you want in the corners. Get there at 5:45am and you do not choose anything; you take what is left, behind someone else's head, and shoot the composition the gap allows.

The cost of being wrong here is your whole morning, and the light does not come back for twenty-four hours.

What the light actually does

The famous glow is not the sun hitting the arch. It is sunlight striking the canyon wall below and behind the arch and bouncing up onto its underside, which is why the effect is orange rather than white, and why it is gone as soon as the sun clears the rim.

It is also brief. You have roughly four minutes of it, give or take — long enough to work a composition you already chose, nowhere near long enough to find one. Everything you decide before the light arrives is the shot; everything you try to decide during it is lost time.

The lens I should have brought

I blew it. I shot this on a 35mm prime on a crop-sensor body — an effective 53mm. Far too tight. A 53mm at that distance cannot hold the arch, and I spent the best light of the morning discovering that rather than composing.

What you want is wide: a 16–35mm or a 14–24mm on full frame. Wide enough to take in the whole span of the arch, the White Rim through the opening, and enough foreground rock to give the thing scale. This is not a subtle preference. It is the difference between the photograph you came for and a crop of part of it.

And a prime is the wrong call regardless. You cannot walk backwards — there is a cliff — so if the focal length is wrong when the light starts, it stays wrong.

What's underneath you

Far below the arch, in the ancient canyon floor, uranium mines once worked the same sandstone that took three hundred million years to form. It is worth knowing while you stand there: the rock framing the prettiest sunrise in Utah is the same rock that was hauled out of here for warheads.

If you only get one morning

Sleep at Willow Flat so the drive is two miles. Be at the parking area at 4am, not 5. Walk in with a headlamp and a jacket. Bring the widest lens you own, on the biggest sensor you own, and put it on the camera before you leave the car.

The Colorado Plateau doesn't negotiate. It only offers this: the light, once, briefly, and never twice the same.