Home»National Park Road Trip - July 2009

What you see in the following galleries are the photos and panoramas that I took on my 4 ½ week road trip in July of 2009. One of my best friends and I visited 12 National Parks and 1 State Park in a hiking trip that we will never forget. We drove over 5,600 miles through 7 states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming) using 281.5 gallons of gas to get us there. In the end, we hiked over 210 miles or on average 8 miles per day if we hiked the entire time, which we didn’t. Our longest hike was a little over 26 miles in a day which ended up being 13 hours on the trail in Grand Teton. Our hardest hike was Long’s Peak in Rocky Mt. which has a summit of 14,259 feet. Our most ridiculous hike in terms of completion time was the 18 mile Grand Canyon Trail, which we completed (hiking down from South Kaibab to Bright Angel Campground/Colorado River at the bottom, back up to the top via Bright Angel) in 6 hours and 30 minutes, with breaks of approximately an hour.

In terms of photography, I brought my laptop on the trip with me to simply offload all of the photos that I took. I used a Canon SD880IS compact camera for some of the photos when carrying my DSLR was simply impossible and my Canon 30D DSLR when I could, as the low light performance is much better. I also used my iPhone on occasion to snap some casual pictures. In total, I took 33.8 Gigabytes of photos after rendereing all of the panoramas. In terms of number of pictures, I took approximately 4,200 photos. What you see in these galleries is the result of literally hundreds of hours of work in rendering panoramas, tone mapping high dynamic range photos, and cropping photos. Software used includes Autopano Pro for panoramas, Photomatix 3.2 for HDRs, and Adobe Photoshop CS3 for other editing. I have identified HDR photos in the galleries, but you will most likely be able to tell anyway. On a special note, this was the first time I shot any HDR panoramas, which can be seen in the Bryce Gallery. Other than some of the panoramas shot in Lassen National Park, all panoramas were shot handheld and without a tripod.

I had a blast on this trip and I can’t recommend road trips enough. If you have any questions about the photos here or would like to order a print, feel free to email me. Enjoy the pictures here and take a look through all the galleries, these are the best of the best. Thanks for looking!