I'm delighted to hear from Andrew Fox that I'll be traveling back to South Australia to dive with the great white sharks December 10-17.

There is a new spring in my step!

The Town named after a Rock

The little town of Mexican Hat is located in a cluster of parks in southern Utah--Monument Valley, the Valley of the Gods, Goosenecks and Natural Bridges.

Mexican Hat takes its name from this unusual stone formation on the outskirts of town. Known as Mexican Hat Rock, it is a perfect signpost that you are entering Mexican Hat from the North.

A smaller cousin to Monument Valley is the Valley of the Gods, thirty miles North on the road that climbs the Moki Dugway and continues to Natural Bridges Natural Mpnument.

This short video clip sweeps the buttes of the Valley of the Gods, and ends with the escarpment in the background which the Moki Dugway climbs.

The buttes here are graceful and slender, but not quite as tall of those in the larger and more famous Monument Valley.

Still, since it gets almost no visitors compared to the number that go to its bigger cousin, it is a peaceful Paradise...

What a place for a full Moon!

When I set up my trip to Monument Valley I chose the full Moon days in hopes of achieving pictures like these. The thousand-foot high formations in the valley were the perfect counterpoint to the rising Moon.

While the weather and clouds closed in for two nights, the first and last nights were brilliantly clear.

From a single spot, using wide angle and telephoto lenses, I shot the Moon. The Moon could not have cooperated any better...

Driving the Moki Dugway

The video of a huge aircraft doing a flyby over Monument Valley (the post prior to this one) and the drive down the road shown in this post were two of the highlights of an amazing trip to southern Utah.

When you drive from Monument Valley to the Valley of the Gods and then on to the Natural Bridges National Monument, you have to drive the astonishing Moki Dugway.

The road is a series of switchbacks carved into the near-vertical face of a huge escarpment. As you drive down the Moki Dugway, the Valley of the Gods is off to your left, a series of formations off the face of the escarpment

The more you drive this vp;pssa; engineering achievement, the more fun it is--I drove it four times, once with the video camera out the window.

This is just a half-minute clip from a seven-minute video of the entire drive from the top to the base. That video is now up on my YouTube site http://www.youtube.com/divexprt.

Hang on to your hats! This section is about halfway down the face of the cliff. Here we go!

A military flyby over Monument Valley

After returning from Monument Valley, I was eager to see if certain videos came out as I remembered shooting them.

One of the most striking was a low-flying 4-engine military aircraft swooping low around Merrick Butte and doing a flyby past me as it left.

It came out. Hope you enjoy it!

Goosenecks, indeed...

Today's Sun made it possible to take pictures at the dramatic Goosenecks State Park, off the road to the Moki Dugway. It is another meander of the mighty Colorado river, just like Horseshoe Bend near Page (100 miles away) and Dead Horse Point State Park outside Canyonlands.

The shame is that Horseshoe Bend is carved in brilliant sandstone filled with iron for red color, while the others are lacking the rust color and are really hard to make beautiful.

Tomorrow is the long drive home, but I am looking forward to actually processing all these pictures and the videos of the low-flying bomber and the Moki Dugway drive....

Goodbye to Utah--for the moment...