This is one you really should view full screen and zoom in on different sections. Click on the “fullscreen” icon to the far right of the tool bar in the flash viewer to go fullscreen, click on the “+” button to zoom in. (you can also use your scroll wheel or keyboard to zoom in and out – the control and shift keys control the zoom)

About Scout Lookout

From Scout Lookout you have an amazing view of Zion Canyon and the Virgin River running through it.

The hike to Scout lookout is 1.9 miles with 1,000 feet of elevation gain. The hike has a few scenic stopping points, and a big chunk of the elevation gain takes places in the “Walters Wiggles” portion of the trail – a series of 21 switchbacks that were cut into the rock in 1926.

About this panorama

This is the highest resolution one that I have yet put up on the web. It’s stitched at around 300 megapixels, and if you are using the flash viewer for it you can zoom in quite far. As you pan around, you will see people starting the hike up to Angels Landing and grabbing onto a cable. The Angels Landing trail is closed for a little while (expected to re-open late October, 2010) while the cables and chains are being replaced with new ones, but even with new chains it will still be a tough hike with sheer drops. So in other words, don’t bring your kids up it.

Things to look for

I didn’t notice it at the time, but if you pan up and zoom in, you can see a bird in the sky. (it’s pretty small even when you zoom all the way in so it’s hard to tell exactly what kind of bird it is – looks like a bird of prey of some sort). If you zoom down and follow the river around the Big Bend you can pan up and see the parking lot for the Weeping Rock trail. As you pan around a bit more you can see the Great White Throne. If you happen to have someone who knows the names of the different features in Zion better than I do – you can hear them point them out to you while you pan around too.

If you look by the toilets you’ll notice the black metal drums that are accumulating waiting to be taken away via helicopter. The hike down from this point lasts only about an hour, so the bathrooms are great for anyone who can’t hold it for an hour… and for everyone else they stink up the area on hot days and motivate you to go explore other areas of the park.

That big pile of bags contain my canyoneering gear and hold my camera stuff while I’m doing a canyon. If I’m doing a wet canyon, I’ll have dry bags for everything – and if I’m doing a wet and cold canyon I’ll have all that stuff plus a drysuit and very sore shoulders.

I thought about blurring out the part where some dork named “Lee” scratched his name into the rock, but I left it in there so we can all look at it and say “What kind of a loser scratches their name into a rock?”. Seriously – don’t ever do that. If you ever see someone do that, get them to stop.

The links!

Flash version

If clicking on the image at the top of the article doesn’t work, or you don’t feel like scrolling back up there, you can view the full 360 panorama of the view from Scout Lookout in Zion National Park

iPad / iPod Version

You can use a special HTML5/CSS 3D viewer of the iPad-friendly panorama of the view from Scout Lookout in Zion National Park

Android Version

If you are on android, you can use the normal full flash link (as long as you have installed the Flash player on your Android phone) – and if you are side-by-side with an iPhone user you can rub in the fact that yours will zoom in farther since it will dynamically load images as it zooms whereas the HTML5/CSS3D viewer cannot.

Spherical Panorama of the Tabernacle on Temple Square

While I was in the area last week, I also managed to take this Spherical Panorama of the Tabernacle on Temple Square. The postion I am taking it from is also the angle where Lloyd Newell delivers the “Spoken Word” portion of Music and the Spoken Word

In 2007 the ensign published a several-page article about the Tabernacle (but the PDF version is much better; it has pictures.)

Panorama of Mount Nebo at Midnight

This trip was about as last-minute as you can get. We decided to hike to the north peak of Mount Nebo Friday afternoon, and left my house around 4:30 PM and headed towards the Nebo Loop in Payson – planning to stop for food along the way.

It turns out, there is only really one place to get fast food on the road from Spanish Fork to Payson, and once we realized that we had passed it we backtracked to it. It’s a Burger King that is attached to a Chevron station. We place or orders, buy some gatorade and misc stuff, and then head back into the car to head to the trailhead.

Chris drives a TDI Jetta, and he takes great pleasure in getting as many miles out of each drop of diesel that he can. I guess part of getting high mileage must involve keeping your tank really low, because after twenty minutes of driving up the hills on the Nebo Loop, his car informs us we have a range of only 5 miles left. A few more turns later and it’s at 0 miles of range left. The tough part about driving a diesel car is that even if you have the lungs and the hose and the lack of morals that would allow you to siphon gas from someone – you are going to have a hard time finding another vehicle in the middle of the wilderness that takes diesel. Chances are if you find one, it’s pulling a hunting trailer and has a 4:1 gun-to-person ratio… so we decide to turn back and get some diesel in his car. Man… If ONLY we were just at a gas station…

We end up starting our hike about 90 minutes later than we had wanted to, but decided to keep going anyway since the people’s GPS tracks we saw showed it only being 4.5 miles to the summit and we tend to hike at least 2.5 or 3 miles per hour – so we could still make it up there by dusk or shortly afterwards…

I recorded my GPS track of the same route that guy we were following used.

Here’s his track, which shows the route we took but lies about how long it is:

On the west face of the ridge, the wind was blowing strong and was bitterly cold. The moment you crossed over to the east face of the ridge the wind was completely gone. As luck would have it, much of the route is on the west face of the ridge (perhaps because people tend to hike early this in the day, so being in the shade in the summer would be nice, but I’m not convinced that the person who put the trail up originally thought things out much since it has a lot of spots where you go down a few hundred feet only to immediately climb back up that same amount).

We reached the summit and took a few pictures of ourselves with the lights behind us, and then I set up and took a panorama. Normally, I shoot several exposures and blend them for an HDR panorama. In this case, there wasn’t a need for HDR. To avoid spending the entire night up there taking images for the panorama, I cranked up the ISO to 6400 and used 8 second exposures. I shot at F/8 at the hyperfocal distance of the lens because the depth of field is important for these things. The end result is the 360×180 Panorama of Mount Nebo at Midnight – lit by a nearly full moon.

It was extremely windy at the summit, and the wind was very cold – so by the time I was done shooting this I was having a hard time even moving my fingers. Some parts of the panorama are degraded because the wind shook the camera, but overall I think it gives a good impression of what it is like up there at night. It’s a nice view – better than the view durring the day in my opinion. Now… had I know that we wouldn’t be getting back to my house until 4:30 AM – I think we would have hiked something shorter instead.

I really need an Ultrawide Angle lens for this kind of thing. If anyone reading this feels like sending me around eight-hundred bucks, I’ll go buy an UWA lens and I’ll take as many 360×180 panoramas of your house that you want

Angel Cove Canyon is a small slot canyon south of Hanksville in the middle of nowhere. Last Saturday the weather was looking rather sketchy most places, and we were already in Bicknell Utah after spending the day in Capitol Reef National Park with my wife’s family. Three of the people in our group were new to canyoneering and we were looking for a canyon that had at least a couple of rappels, was relatively close to where we already were, and had a relatively small catch basin to protect against the danger of a flash flood.

How to find the canyon

With the help of Dave Pimental’s excellent Minislot Guide to the Colorado Plateau website we decided that Angel Cove Canyon would be an excellent choice. Had the weather and time permitted, we might have also done the nearby Angel Slot canyon.

Related Posts

While in the canyon, I took several sets of 360×180 panoramas to try to help give a feel for what the canyon is like. The first one I took shows a panorama of a minor crossroads in Angel Cove Canyon. Later on down the canyon it narrows up and becomes quite pretty so I took another panorama of the narrow slot canyon part of Angel Cove Canyon and finally I took a panorama of the two-stage rappel sequence at the end of Angel Cove Canyon to try to give a feel for that part of the canyon. On our way out of the canyon, a thunderstorm moved in over us and I captured a single-row panorama of flash flooding causing waterfalls on Sandstone

Summary

My overall summary of the canyon is that it’s a fun short canyon that can be done by beginner canyoneers without too much difficulty.
More experienced canyoneers will enjoy the scenic sections and will appreciate the extremely short approach. It has no bolts, so if you aren’t comfortable rappelling off of a big pile of rocks you might want to go elsewhere. It’s narrow sections are photogenic and it is close by other canyons. It’s remote setting and lack of crowds is also appealing.

Early on in Angel Cove Canyon

The first part of Angel Cove Canyon is fairly wide with some occasional downclimbing. When we were there, there was a bunch of knotted rope left behind by an earlier party at each of the drops. I think it is more fun to do canyons where there isn’t a bunch of crap already there from the groups in front of you – part of the fun is figuring out how you want to get down the specific drops. When there are fixed ropes left sitting there it eliminates a lot of the thinking.

The particular area of this shot you can see part of our group going down one of the downclimbs while another part of our group hangs out in the shade of another finger of a canyon coming in from the north.

This is the last of my angel cove 360×180 panoramas. I have plenty more pictures I will post later, most likely on my flickr photostream.

Demolition Derby video on MobileMe