Photography: A Pondering Chipmunk at Bryce Canyon

I took this picture in 2008 in Southern Utah's Bryce Canyon National Park. Please visit my store page to purchase prints of my photos. Thank you everyone who has ordered photos, your purchase helps support this blog!

THE STORY BEHIND THE PHOTO

A chipmunk ponders his life's meaning and insignificance in a world that is but a speck of dust in the vast cosmic ocean, while taking in the silent splendor of Bryce Canyon... I like to think so anyway.

After leaving Zion National Park, the next stop on our hiking tour of the Grand Staircase was Bryce Canyon.

The early settler, Ebenezer Bryce, called it “a helluva place to lose a cow.” He was right, it certainly would be. We wandered through a labyrinth of multi-hued and impossibly thin pillars of rock called hoodoos that fill the canyon floor. Some look as though a stiff breeze could knock them over.

The shadow and color at Bryce change between sunrise and sunset, making it look a little different every hour of the day. And no matter where you point your camera, you capture something wonderful. This meant I had a hard time putting my camera away. I took well over three hundred pictures on this day alone. This was the first one I took in the park and my favorite. The way he seems to be staring out at the view somehow reminds me of how it feels to stand on the edge looking down at such a place. My narrow depth of field blurs the landscape itself, but that was intentional. It's that feeling that matters to me most.
  

A Backpacker's Life List by Ryan Grayson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.