Light conditions were not necessarily perfect as it took longer than expect to get to the Fire Wave in Valley of Fire SP, but it was extreme fun to crawl and walk around the floating layers of rock.

I hadn't heard about Valley of Fire SP before arriving California and thus didn't consider going. Digging deeper into my travel guide 'USA Südwesten' sparked my interest though and the park clearly exceeded every expectation. Browsing though at dawn the colors were truly diverse and most funnily the road looked like a long carpet just having been thrown over the rocks.

The day trip though Grand-Staircase-Escalante-NM via highway no 12 - Boulder mountain pass - was a comparable color adventure to the endless canyons I'd seen before. This time it were the yellow glowing Aspens standing out from the blue sky and winterly dull surrounding landscape. The first viewpoints were covered by the low hanging clouds, but before starting into the switchback part of the road the scene opened up.

Wikipedia says: "A hoodoo (also called a tent rock, fairy chimney, and earth pyramid) is a tall, thin spire of rock that protrudes from the bottom of an arid drainage basin or badlands." Bryce Canyon is basically just that and all over the place. Endless needles from trough the valley with various paths crossing through. This again is an HDR work shot at sunrise and composed from 15 individual frames adding to a file size of 115MB raw.