Elephant Canyon Mushrooms & Needles Castle

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Canyonlands National Park, San Juan County, Utah
late afternoon Sunday June 4, 1995, slide 97A_20-32
Olympus OM-4T, 24mm Zuiko, Benbo Trekker
Drum scanned 35mm Kodachrome 64 to 100mb RGB file
Adobe Photoshop 6.0 processed for accurate image fidelity
Lightjet5000 printed on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
signature bottom mid left

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In 1995 I had day hiked three times into the Elephant Canyon area of Canyonlands National Park's Needles district. In 1997 a friend and I made an epic spring road tour back out to the Colorado Plateau which included a backpack into that same area. On the second morning after having camped at the designated campsite in Chesler Park, we rambled about what I thought were the most interesting areas nearby in this extraordinary canyon. The area is quite challenging to move about off the trails not only due to the fact one must take care to not trample the fragile soils, but also as can be seen in this image, the ancient sedimentary rock is deeply eroded with dangerous sheer arroyos.

Elevations here are about 5,500 feet. During spring occasional episodes of monsoon thunderstorms coming north from Mexico may be vigorous enough to provide flowing water down the arroyos. Flowing water at the bottom of the arroyos is brief however. In favorable places shallow pools form then sink back into sand before reappearing further down canyon over bedrock May is the peak of spring whence during wet years, a modest number of wildflowers including cactus decorate areas where soils has accumulated. The best time for hiking too as some water may be available.

Geology here is from the ancient Paleozoic era early Permian period over 250 million years ago. White Cedar Mesa Sandstone interleaves with rusty red beds of Elephant Canyon Formation's Cutler arkosic sandstone accentuating the surreal landscape of eroded pinnacles and mushrooms. The white sandstone when above is apparently somewhat more resistant to erosion than the red sandstone so tends to form wider turban shaped caps atop it. In the near foreground at right, note the white blotches of lichen atop a thin black coating characteristic of cryptogamic soils. Below in the arroyo 30 to 50 feet below are small oaks in this arid environment. Earlier this day below the pinnacles at center frame we had nearly stepped on a small rattlesnake.

For this image my tripod position was on a sketchy edge of one of these mushrooms. I had slowly traveled across a maze of formations homing in on this most aesthetic geometry of pinnacles in the background. Temperatures on this absolutely sunny day were already well into the 80's and it was only mid morning. A record heat wave was occurring. Thursday my friend and I had slowly carried a crushing weight of water in from the trailhead four and a half miles during 90 plus degree heat at midday. I never sweated so much in my life. An hour after shooting this image we broke camp with little water left, then hiked a couple miles to another designated campsite where we had to hike a mile to pump water from a sandy canyon bottom pool. Despite the heat and grueling effort, we had a terrific time in this utterly incredible landscape.

Crop at 100% print size:

   David Senesac
   email: sales@davidsenesac.com

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