The journey
The quintessential American road trip: three weeks through the national parks of the Far West, from California to Utah, across deserts, canyons, giant sequoias and panoramas that redefine the concept of grandeur.
Starting from San Francisco, the city of the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman's Wharf and the Victorian houses of Alamo Square. Two days to explore the neighbourhoods — the Castro, Haight-Ashbury, Chinatown — and drive down Lombard Street, America's most winding road. In the morning, fog wraps around the bridge and the bay, creating an atmosphere only San Francisco can offer.
The drive down Big Sur is one of the world's most beautiful roads: Highway 1 winding between cliffs sheer above the Pacific Ocean, with bridges like Bixby Bridge suspended over the void and waves crashing hundreds of metres below. Every curve reveals a new panorama, and the temptation to stop at every viewpoint is irresistible.
Sequoia National Park is the realm of giants: the General Sherman Tree, the largest tree on the planet by volume, has a trunk 31 metres in circumference and is over 2,000 years old. Walking among the sequoias puts human timescales into perspective.
Yosemite is perhaps America's most beautiful park. Half Dome and El Capitan — the world's most famous granite walls for climbers — rise above Yosemite Valley like natural cathedrals. Yosemite Falls plunges 739 metres in three cascades, and the valley meadows are painted in golden light at sunset. A place that inspired photographers like Ansel Adams and still takes your breath away today.
Crossing Death Valley in the August sun is an extreme experience: Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America (86 metres below sea level), is a blinding white salt flat where temperatures exceed 50°C. Zabriskie Point and the Artist's Palette offer lunar landscapes of coloured rock that seem from another planet. One night in Las Vegas — the most surreal contrast possible after the desert silence.
Utah is a succession of geological wonders. Zion National Park with its vertiginous walls of cream and red Navajo Sandstone, the Angels Landing trail climbing a narrow ridge with 450-metre drops. Bryce Canyon and its hoodoo formations — orange rock columns sculpted by erosion creating a natural amphitheatre unique in the world, especially at dawn when the raking light ignites every spire.
The Grand Canyon is a sight that takes your breath away no matter how many times you look. One thousand six hundred metres deep, two billion years of geological strata exposed like the pages of an open book. The South Rim at sunset turns red, orange, purple and blue in a sequence of colours no photograph can truly capture.
Antelope Canyon, near Page, is a natural sculpture: waves of red sandstone smoothed by water and wind into sinuous forms, with shafts of light penetrating from above to illuminate the golden sand below. A sacred place for the Navajo and a paradise for photographers.
Monument Valley is the quintessential cinematic icon: the red sandstone mesas and buttes rising from the desert plain — the landscape of John Ford's westerns. Driving through the Navajo reservation among the rock formations is like stepping into a film.
Dead Horse Point offers a dizzying view over the great bend of the Colorado River, and nearby Canyonlands is a labyrinth of canyons, arches and spires extending as far as the eye can see. Arches National Park, with over 2,000 natural sandstone arches — the Delicate Arch against a red sunset sky has become the symbol of Utah.
Return to Denver through the Rocky Mountains, with the sun setting behind snow-capped peaks. A trip that puts everything in perspective: human scale, the sense of time, the very concept of natural beauty.
Photographs (11)
