Tri-state tour continues

Today was another travel day. It was a long, long drive.

We headed east to Flagstaff and then north along Highway 89. We were headed towards the Vermilion Cliffs Scenic Roadway. The Arizona highway maps (we have two) we were using to navigate differentiate between scenic roadways and national scenic byways. Highway 89 qualifies as neither but despite that snub we found the trip to be way scenic.

Highlights included the crossing of the Little Colorado River at Cameron, Arizona and the entire range of cliffs always present along the right side of the road and designated by one of our maps as Echo Cliffs. We were also running along something called the Hamblin Wash and later the Tanger Wash.  This isn't even one of the really scenic spots but it is a spot with a nice enough view of an Echo Cliff and of Hamblin Wash.

Close examination may result in identification of a flock of goats out there near the dirt road.

Shortly after beginning on the officially designated Vermilion Cliffs Scenic Roadway we came to Navajo Bridge, the only roadway and bridge crossing the Colorado River for nearly 600 miles.  This is a look upstream with Vermilion Cliffs National Monument looming in the background.

This shot is from the bridge towards the west bank.  The road swings south towards that range of hills.  It truly is scenic, almost unbelievably so.

Another look from near the bridge.

The road ran along Marble Canyon for a time before ascending to the Kaibab Plateau.

This is the view from the House Rock Valley Overlook.  The valley is off to the left and isn't terrifically photogenic, partly due to the persistent haze.  This is Marble Canyon.

The road climbs along Marble Canyon for a good long stretch, a significantly scenic stretch at least partly because the rocks now shift to mostly white from the reddish hues which had dominated the day to that point.

We reached Jacob Lake just in time for a late lunch but also just in time to run into a conflict at the Jacob Lake Inn and Cafe with a scheduled stop by an entire bus of tourists.

In order to be fit into the restaurant schedule we agreed to share a table with Phil and Mick, newlyweds from Pennsylvania.  Well they referred to themselves as newlyweds.  They married in 2008 in Las Vegas with the two of them seated on the seat of Phil's motorcycle.  This time they were touring by Prius.  They were headed to the North Rim and then to Mount Rushmore and then the Upper Peninsula, across into Canada, back into the USA in New York state and then home to Pennsylvania.

They seemed to have no particular destination and all the time they wanted to get there.

We crossed the state line about an hour later into Utah, making the tour a three state tour.  I just pulled off the road at any old random spot near Kanab, Utah, to take a picture of the very routine, extremely spectacular scenery.

So tonight we are in Saint George, Utah. Saint George is exactly on the path of the annular eclipse and we arrived in time to be standing out in front of the motel as the event reached its peak.

I have taken lots and lots of sunset photos and I had hoped that this deal would be enough similar to that to allow me to get some photos of the rim of fire at full  eclipse.

You cannot, of course, look directly at the sun but I could look in the general direction of the sun and open the shutter. While we were standing out there I did this several times but each time I reviewed what I had taken it really didn't seem like I was getting anything at all.

But still, at full annular eclipse I went ahead and fired off a bunch of shots. Open the shutter, later on take a look and see what you've got.

There was a young family out there who had been planning this thing long enough that they had 6 pairs of the appropriate protective lenses, one each for Mom and Dad, and one each for each of the four children. As will happen the children quickly tired of the whole eclipse thing and Mom and Dad lent us the almost always available extra lenses. We both had the lenses and were able to gaze directly at the sun at full annularity.

Was it cool?

Indeed it was.

So I came in and downloaded the memory from the camera to the computer and started clicking on the images for a closer look.  I discovered that I did, unfortunately, get pretty much nothing at all of the sun.  But then I noticed that weirdly enough there were ghost images in several of the frames.

Here's what I  got before the eclipse.

At full eclipse.

After the full annular eclipse.

We are now close enough to the airport in Las Vegas to allow us to make a run for it in time for our flight home without having to start a day and a half in advance.  We do seem to have a couple of more days before we have to make that run and there does seem to be a national park in the more or less immediate vicinity.