The Canyon Country Comet Adventure
- Glenn Randall
- Nov 14
- 12 min read
Updated: Nov 15
By early October 2025, it was clear that Comet Lemmon C/2025 A6 was going to be the brightest comet of the year. During its grand tour of the solar system, it would be closest to Earth on October 21st. That date happened to coincide with new moon, creating ideal conditions for photographing the comet. The last 10 days of October also happen to be the best time to photograph the cottonwoods in fall color in the canyon country of southern Utah. It was time to plan a comet and fall-color shoot. As it turned out, however, Scottish poet Robert Burns was right back in 1785: “The best-laid schemes of mice and men go oft astray.”
I decided to start in Goblin Valley State Park, recognized by DarkSky International as having one of the darkest skies on earth. I used Starry Night to get the exact azimuth and altitude of the comet at astronomical dusk in Goblin Valley on October 21st. I then planned to shoot fall color in Coyote Gulch, a tributary to the Escalante River. My wife Cora and I had backpacked into the gulch in 1991 (“BC” as we say – before children) and I had wonderful memories of massive arches and huge, overhanging alcoves with a delightful, placid stream flowing below.
I drove from my home in Boulder to Goblin Valley on October 21st, then spent the afternoon looking for the right place to shoot Comet Lemmon setting between two hoodoos. After shooting sunset and the twilight glow, I set up my iOptron Sky Tracker Pro and mounted my Sony a7R V and Sony 35mm f/1.4 lens atop it. The comet’s tail proved to be disappointingly short, but with enough cropping of the 60-megapixel image, I managed to get a usable image.
In the morning, after shooting sunrise overlooking the valley, I headed southwest toward the Water Tank trailhead off Hole in the Rock Road. The drive was spectacular. The cottonwoods along the Fremont River near Capitol Reef National Park were near the peak of fall color, giving me hope that the cottonwoods in Coyote Gulch would also be photogenic. Then, as I drove south from Torrey, deep canyons opened up on both sides of the road as the road snaked along the top of a ridge. Finally, I turned south on Hole in the Rock Road. After 36 miles of hellish but dry washboard, I turned onto Fortymile Ridge Road and drove another four miles to the Water Tank trailhead.
It was 3:35 p.m., just three hours before sunset, by the time I started toward Coyote Gulch. Sandy, braided trails led north to slickrock benches and ribs. After two miles I reached the final steep drop off into Coyote Gulch. I knew that the last hundred vertical feet of descent into the gulch were very steep. Some people rated it fourth-class, meaning the hardest scrambling most people are willing to do without a rope. Others rated it low fifth class, meaning most hikers would only feel safe if roped up. However, my neighbor Gordon Maclean, a lean, athletic guy who’s a bit older than I, had done it twice, once with his own overnight pack and once with a companion’s pack, although he was climbing up the slab with a load, not carrying a big pack down it. I thought that if he could do it, surely I could, since I had a stronger background in technical rock climbing than he did.
I reached the beginning of the crux descent. I could see a pair of backpackers at their campsite just below me, as well as Jacob Hamblin Arch, where I planned to camp. I was almost there. The first moves, however, looked quite sketchy. I turned to face the rock and attempted the first hard move. Immediately my water bottle slipped out of its hipbelt holster and tumbled the full length of the slab to the bottom. It was an unnerving sight. If I slipped, I would do the same. I set my pack down carefully and tried the first hard moves again. Without a 40-pound load on my back, the moves felt much easier. I finished climbing down the steep slab, retrieved my water bottle, and scrambled back up to my pack, rehearsing all the difficult moves. I hoisted the pack and contemplated what it would feel like to do the scramble with that size load. The thought was scary, yet the bottom of the canyon was so close. After several long moments of indecision, I turned uphill and headed back to the truck. An hour later I was back at the trailhead. After calling Cora to tell her about my change of plans, I drove to the Hurricane Wash trailhead and camped. The Hurricane Wash route to Jacob Hamblin Arch was much longer, about seven miles rather than two, but it involved no scrambling whatsoever.
That evening I saw vigorous lightning storms to the north, south, and east. It rained for 20 or 30 minutes around midnight, and I still saw lightning flashes far to the east when I got up about 6:30 a.m., an hour before sunrise. The forecast, however, called for clearing skies and only a slight chance of rain during the day. I was on the trail by 8:00 a.m. As predicted, the skies began to clear, and I made good time for the first five and a half miles down Hurricane Wash to its junction with Coyote Gulch.
A perennial stream flows through Coyote Gulch, and it’s impossible to hike through the gulch without wading the stream repeatedly. As I was exploring for a way to make my first creek-crossing, I examined a four-foot-wide stretch of the creek and assumed that it could only be a few inches deep. Then I plunged a trekking pole into it and was astonished when the entire shaft of the pole disappeared into murky water. At that point the creek was at least three feet deep, if not deeper. It was my first warning that conditions would be far different than when Cora and I had backpacked into Coyote Gulch 34 years earlier.
The sky began to darken as I was setting up camp at the arch around noon. I heard a distant jet – or was it thunder? The rumble grew louder and closer. Now it was unmistakably thunder. I was just pulling off my soaking wet shoes and socks and climbing into the tent when rain began. I lounged in the tent while it rained lightly, with occasional lulls, for an hour and a half. When the rainfall finally tapered off, I slipped on my water sandals and climbed out of the tent. Suddenly I noticed that the stream seemed to be much louder than it had been just an hour and a half earlier. I walked over to the creek, some 30 yards away. What had been a placid stream perhaps six to eight inches deep and six to eight feet wide was now a muddy torrent the color and consistency of chocolate milk, at least 20 feet wide, with depth unknown.
The flood had still not subsided at 5:00 p.m. I had just a pint of plain water and few gulps of Gatorade in my bottles – barely enough for dinner and certainly not enough for breakfast. The creek was so muddy I hated to try to filter it. Any attempt to get water from the creek would clog the filter instantly and might ruin the pump mechanism. Thirty-four years earlier, a ranger had told Cora and me about a spring, not marked on the USGS 7.5 minute quad, just on the far side of Jacob Hamblin Arch. I still had that map, with the spring hand-marked. I pulled on my boots again and contemplated trying to wade across the creek, thinking I might be able to scramble up to the opening in Jacob Hamblin Arch and down the far side. The creek was running the full width of the canyon as far as I could see downstream. Wading that far in completely opaque water was a daunting prospect. I reached out from the bank as far as I could with a trekking pole and probed the creek. It was at least a foot deep there, and probably much deeper in the middle of the torrent. I decided to make do with the water I had and hope that the flow would drop by morning so I could get to the spring on the opposite side of the arch.
The morning dawned clear – too clear. I had hoped for clouds to light up at sunrise. After waiting until 10 minutes after sunrise, I pulled on my wet, frigid shoes and set out to get water. The creek had indeed dropped overnight, but it was still chocolate brown. I approached the creek and immediately plunged mid-calf-deep into quicksand that filled my shoes with gravel. I retreated hastily and found another way across the creek, then climbed unstable talus to reach the opening in the arch. There seemed to be no way down the far side, however, so I retreated and walked down the creek a quarter mile to the far side of the arch. Immediately I spotted a cairn. I poked my head under some bushes and saw water dripping. My excitement quickly turned to disappointment. It looked like it would take an hour to fill a quart bottle. I explored farther along the creek. Just 20 to 30 feet downstream, I heard water flowing. This spring easily filled a quart bottle in a minute. I filled my bottles and headed back to camp to make breakfast.
As I was setting up to shoot sunrise earlier, I had noticed a notch in the skyline to the southeast. With nothing better to do, I had used my mirror-sight compass to estimate the altitude and azimuth of the notch in the skyline, then checked Sun Surveyor for the exact position of the sun between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m. It looked like there was a chance the sun would rise into that notch and allow me to enhance a 180-degree panorama of Jacob Hamblin Arch and the enormous adjacent alcove with a sunstar. After breakfast I began packing up. Although I had planned a two-night trip, the cottonwoods were still green and the creek was still an unappealing muddy brown. I decided I would have a better chance of making compelling images if I went elsewhere.
As I packed, I watched the shadow of the notch, cast on the opposite wall of the canyon, descend lower and lower as the sun rose higher. To my delight, the shadow finally reached me and the sun burst into view in the bottom of the notch. I shot multiple panorama sequences, trying to catch the moment when the sun was mostly obscured but still producing an elegant sunstar. When I felt I had the shot, I finished packing and headed out.
About a mile into the hike, I followed a social trail that quickly petered out. I was off-route, heading up a side canyon. I turned around and started hiking back to the main canyon, following lightly beaten trails through thick brush. Obviously, other people had made the same mistake. The footing underneath was wet, but the water was only an inch deep. I came to a tiny pond, perhaps six feet long and four feet wide, with a narrow band of down-trodden reeds along one edge. The water in the pond was muddy and opaque, but I assumed it could only be a few inches deep. I began traversing along the edge of the pond. Suddenly my right foot skated off some slippery reeds and plunged into the pond. In an instant, I was floundering in chest-deep water. My camera, a Sony a7R V with a 16-35mm f/2.8 GM II lens – about $6,000 worth of gear – was in a chest pack. My phone was in a cargo pocket of my shorts. Frantic and utterly astonished, I hauled myself out of the pond as fast as possible. I checked the camera. Fortunately, only a few drops of water had penetrated the chest pack, and the camera seemed fine. My phone had been completely immersed, but I had no way to dry it at that moment in the deep shade of a narrow portion of the canyon.
Soaked to the skin, cold, and angry with myself, I hurried on to the junction of Coyote Gulch and Hurricane Wash, where I knew the canyon widened and I could get warm in the bright sunshine. Never in half a century of backpacking had I ever ended up chest-deep in a pond with a full load on my back. I dried my phone as best I could but didn't dare turn it on until it was fully dry. After eating a much-needed lunch, I finished the hike out, pushing hard, and started driving toward the tiny town of Escalante.
Hole in the Rock Road is notorious for being impassable when wet. Soon I came to a place where the road was entirely covered with standing water for a distance of 50 or 75 feet. It was impossible to see how deep the water was, but I had to get out of the backcountry, so I put my 4Runner into four-wheel-drive and hit the pond going about 15 miles an hour. A huge wave of muddy water sloshed up over the hood and crashed into the windshield as I fishtailed through the mud and emerged on the far side.
Before the trip I had been dealing with a mild case of plantar fasciitis (pain in my right heel) which had worsened as the trip progressed. When I got out of the truck at the Prospector Inn in Escalante, my heel hurt so badly that I could barely put weight on it, and I was limping heavily as I walked up to the front desk. I checked into my room and spread everything out to dry. I opened every pocket on my pack, emptied every stuff sack, and discovered to my relief that most of my gear had not gotten as wet as I had feared. When the phone was thoroughly dry, I turned it on. Aside from a couple of thin lines of dead pixels on the screen, it seemed to work fine.
My plan after Coyote Gulch was to explore the dirt roads and hiking trails in the southern and northern portions of Capitol Reef National Park. With the dirt roads a quagmire and my heel still hurting, those plans had to change. I decided to stick to paved roads and explore short trails and scenic overlooks in the well-developed central portion of the park, staying overnight in a hotel in Torrey just outside the park.
In the morning I started driving toward Torrey, pausing along the way for several hours to hike to Lower Calf Creek Falls, a 130-foot-high cascade about 2.9 miles from the trailhead. The falls tumble down the back of a towering, multi-hued sandstone amphitheater into a deep pool surrounded by cottonwoods in fall color. The idyllic scene allowed me to create several of my favorite images from the trip. I paused again to do the short hike to Upper Calf Creek Falls, but it proved to be less photogenic than its cousin downstream.
From Upper Calf Creek Falls I drove to the Sunset View Overlook on the outskirts of Capitol Reef National Park, arriving just after the sun disappeared into thick clouds. I stayed till sunset, but the sun never emerged. I packed up and started walking back to the parking lot about one-third of a mile away. As I popped over a little rise, I saw to my surprise that the clouds to the west had turned crimson. I sprinted up to the nearby Goosenecks Overlook and grabbed a few frames, but I was too late: the color was already fading.
I had just one full day to explore the central part of the park. After shooting sunrise from the Goosenecks of Sulphur Creek Overlook, I hiked the Fremont Gorge Overlook Trail and the trail to Cassidy Arch, then photographed cottonwoods in fall color along the Fremont River in the Fruita historic district.
After that I just had time to hike to Hickman Natural Bridge and make it back to Sunset View for sunset. However, when I reached the bridge, a spectacular, 133-foot span, I changed my mind and decided to stay to shoot sunset. Fortunately, I had brought a headlamp. Unfortunately, I had not brought my tripod, but I was able to brace the camera atop a rock and make sharp photographs even in sunset light.
As I was waiting for sunset, I used Sun Surveyor to get the azimuth of sunrise for that date and location, set that angle on my compass, and was delighted to discover that the sun would rise at a low point on the skyline. If the sky was clear at the eastern horizon the next morning, the shot could be stunning.
In the morning, I hiked to Hickman Bridge in the dark, set up, and waited. The lacy clouds filling the sky lit up a soft pink just before sunrise. Already the shoot was getting exciting. Then the sun came over the horizon and bathed the inner rim of the arch and the foreground boulders in golden light. I shot until the rising sun began creating unmanageable flare, then packed up and headed out. I knew I had just made one of the best images of the trip. (It's now available as a print.)
I spent the final night of my trip back at the Goblin Valley campground. I managed to make a few pleasing shots at sunset, but my effort to shoot Comet Lemmon a second time was thwarted by clouds. After shooting a cold, disappointing sunrise, I put the hammer down for Boulder and a much-anticipated reunion with Cora. I arrived home in midafternoon. The final tally for the trip: eight days; half a dozen changes of plans; 80 miles of driving on washboard dirt roads (and way too much driving on pavement); 37 miles of sore-footed hiking; 10 sunrise and sunset shoots; one humbling lesson about the limits of my willingness to downclimb steep slabs with a heavy load, unroped; one reminder that the challenges of wilderness travel can surprise even the most veteran backpackers; and nearly 100 gigabytes of images to fuel a lifetime of memories and plans for next year.
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