Musing on many miles traveled
By Lorenzo Menendez
18 Jan 2008
Our road trip has come and gone, it has been almost a week since we returned home. Even in such a short span of time it now seems like so long ago that we were traversing the roads of Arizona and Nevada. While our trip was only 2,000 plus miles and ventured into 2 other states i cannot stop being amazed at how drastically the scenery changes and just how much beauty there was in such a short trip. We travelled the arid lands of Joshua Tree National Forest that despite it being a desert is abundant with life and seemingly empty roads. Setting foot upon the shores of the Salton Sea was like stepping upon the shores of another world, it reeked of decay and yet even in this desolate wasteland whose very demise was cause by man there was great beauty to be admired and captured. Amid the smell of sulfur and rotting fish there was life and an incredibly beautiful landscape, not so much in its abundance of color or vegetation but in its very sense of isolation and eerie sense that you are the only one left on the planet. Crossing into Arizona there was a lot of desert as is to be expected but even here we found places rich in plants and incredible explosions of color, and who could soon forget the majestic and vivid red cliffs of Sedona. Going from desert landscape and rising up to Flagstaff to be greeted by not cactus and arid desert but pine trees and 3 feet of snow. The bane of any photographers existence is the midday sun as this was the time that we were passing through this gorgeous snow, and so as it happens some times all we could do was drive through and enjoy the scenery as only our eyes and incredible brain has the ability to resolve so much contrast. Having gone up we had to eventually come back down and the scenery changed once more into the desert that we had come all to familiar with and so we travelled onto Las Vegas but had to make a brief stop at the Hoover Dam ( this turned into a longer stay than anticipated). While not the incredible natural landscapes that we had enjoyed thus far one cant help but be blown away at the incredible ingenuity of mankind. To see this amazing structure and know that it holds back so much water is truly an amazing thing to behold. While our trip did not end there our photographic journey did as we were pretty tired and after shooting so much nonstop even a photographer gets to the point here he doesnt even want to think about carrying his camera to another location. There are really so many incredible things in our world that are just waiting to be photographed, i encourage you to take some time daily and capture what inspires you. One can take comfort in the fact that the photograph we capture is our moment in time as it will never happen again in the same way...
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