Sunday, May 12, 2019

May 12 - Fantasy Canyon

Happy Mother’s Day everyone!

Today we drove about 35 miles south to a place called Fantasy Canyon.

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It is a small area of weird and fantastical shaped sandstone that has been sculpted by the wind. Jennie really loves this stuff.

Since it is on BLM land I got a chance to try out my new drone. There are a lot of restrictions as to where you can fly it but the app said that it was OK here.

It is called a DJI Mavic Air. The internet standard for scale is a banana.

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The controller uses a smart phone as it display. The arms fold up and it all fits in the small case, with some extra batteries. I wanted one that I could take on hikes, where it is allowed to use it.

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It will fly about 15 minutes on a battery. I have three. It is super smart and has front , rear and downward pointing cameras as well as the main camera on a gimbal for me to take pictures. The drone monitors the other cameras and will stop if it is about to run into something. It is really easy to fly. When the battery is about to die it will just fly it self back to where it took off from and land.

To get to the canyon you have to drive last 5 miles on a not terrible dirt road, although they say it gets really bad if it has been wet. It was easy today.

I am not sure what these are but we eyed each other as we slowly drove by.

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Once you get there you feel like you are in the middle of nowhere and you kind of are.

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I even did a photosphere from the parking lot.

The area of interest is pretty small, only a couple of hundred square meters. This drone shot shows the entire place.

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There was a sign board that show a trail to take to see some named features.

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There were supposed to be markers pointing to the features but many were missing.

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This one said that the witches head is 24 feet away in the direction of the arrow and 10 feet up. Actually I don’t think I could identify a single one of the named shapes. As you will see there was just too much going on.

We took a lot of pictures. I will try and not go too crazy. Another blogger had a post with at least 200 pictures. They just became a blur.

It was quite hot with no wind so Jennie had a nice bright red umbrella that showed up really well.

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A horned helmet?

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I should have worn something brighter.

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A photosphere.

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A dragon?

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Everything looked so fragile but somehow they manage to keep their shape.

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This corner looked like a huge dinosaur backbone.

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We climbed up on top of one of the hills for an overview.

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A photosphere.

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The main slot canyon to the western edge had the most going on. Here are three drone shots of it. Look for the red umbrella.

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The drone can also automatically do its own version of a photosphere called a skypixel. Be sure to click on the 4 arrows button at the bottom right to expand it to full screen.

And back to the ground.

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The drone was hard to keep track of against the bright sunlight. When I flew the drone there was only one other couple and I asked them if they didn’t mind. I put it away when more people arrived.

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I launched from the top of the hill so I could more easily keep track of it. The new rules say that it should never be out of sight.

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A photosphere.

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We had lunch at the table.

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We stayed about 2 hours before heading to Vernal to do some shopping and to try and find a place for dinner. There was not much open other than fast food.

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A very interesting place. It would be a killer in the summer heat though.

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