Have you ever been to the Sun Tunnels in Utah? No? Well, you are not the only one. Actually, I’ve never even heard of them until a few months ago and I have lived in Utah for 13 years by now. 🙂
If you would like to read up on them here is a link: http://utah.com/wendover/sun-tunnels
Basically these are concrete Pipes that are aligned to have the effect of light bouncing through them during the two yearly solstices.
“Two of the Sun tunnels align with the setting and rising sun during the summer solstice and two line up during the winter solstice.”
Someone posted a picture of them in one of the facebook groups I’m in and so my friend and I decided that we should go and check them out. It was definitely past time for another road trip. So after deciding on a weekend where both of us have time (which seems to get harder and harder lately, life gets just so busy… 🙂 ) we agreed on the evening of July 31st. After reading the instructions on how to get there we figured we should be able to get there in time after our normal work day… Oh were we wrong… 🙂 We ended up leaving SLC around 5:30pm… So here is the deal… Wendover is about 2 hours away from Salt Lake City (where my friend and I work). You can get there a little faster if you don’t drive in rush hour (which we did) but 2 hours is a pretty good estimate… We still figured we would make it there just in time for the sunset. Sunset was supposed to be around 8:45pm (don’t quote me on the exact time… ) so we figured even with a 2 hour drive to wendover we should be fine. Well, there are two ways to get to the sun tunnels… One is by driving into Nevada and turning back around through Utah which was about 60+ miles (mostly paved road) or the other way was by driving on a dirt road for approx 45.5 miles. We decided that we could go faster on the paved road so we took the “long way around”. We guesstimated to still make it there just in time for the sunset…
Needless to say, we were wrong… Oh so wrong… 🙂 Since there are mountains in the area you don’t have until the exact sunset time… Plus, 60 miles take forever if you can’t drive 65mph… 🙂 Anyway, the sun went down while we were still driving and not anywhere near the tunnels… BUT… we were lucky and had a blue moon that night… Which meant FULL MOON… This moon was incredible when it first came up… Huge and red… We stopped for just a moment to take a few quick shots out of the car since we decided by then that we still wanted to go to the tunnels but now we had to find them first while there was still some light…
This was one of the moon pictures taken out of the car…
And close up of the moon later that night…
So after that quick stop we kept going towards the sun tunnels… We ended up on the dirt road that was supposed to be only about 45.5 miles long and it didn’t seem so bad… So we figured we might try that to get back to Wendover since it was 20 miles shorter…
But I’m getting ahead of myself… When we got to the Sun Tunnels there was one car driving around it but they left shortly after we parked… Now here is the deal… The Sun Tunnels are out in the middle of nowhere… And I mean nowhere… There is nothing out there for miles on end… So here we are, my friend and I all by ourselves… It’s definitely a weird feeling if you know that no one would hear you if something happens… 🙂 So don’t go there on a first date or something like that!!! 🙂 You want to know the person that you are going with… 🙂 Thank goodness my friend is one of my closest friends whom I’ve known since I first moved to the US and we are always going on photography road trips together… 🙂 And she is awesome! 🙂 Ok, got sidetracked again… 🙂 (I do that a lot… Have I mentioned “shiny” yet? 🙂 ) Anyway, here we are at the Sun Tunnels and the moon is shining bright as can be… Which caused the sun tunnels to actually get flooded by the moon light…
This was just the moonlight shining into the tunnels… I would imagine it looks like this at sunset, too, though, besides that you wouldn’t have any stars up in the sky…
After trying out all kinds of different angles and silhouette shots we’ve decided to do some light painting… Like I said, there was no one else there so we had some fun… It was absolutely beautiful… And so peaceful!! Here are some of the shots I took that night… All of these were long exposures (30sec) shot with my Canon 60D and my Tokina 11-16mm wide angle lens. ISO was at 100 since the moon was bright enough to highlight the scene.
I decided to try out some Self Portraits… 🙂
And before we left my friend decided to drive a circle around the sun tunnels… I liked the light streaks from her tail lights… 🙂
Around midnight we decided that we should really leave and get back to Wendover (where we had a hotel room reserved). So we packed up and started heading back… We decided that we should try the dirt road since it was shorter (mileagewise) and we were pretty hungry and tired and just wanted to get back… The dirt road looked pretty decent at the beginning so we thought we would be fine… Yeah, right… 🙂 The further we got on the road the more washboard like it got… The washboard turned into deep ditches ( I guess they had some flooding going on some time before we went there) and since it was pitch black we didn’t see some of those really deep ditches… All I can say I felt horrible for my friends truck… And I’m grateful for not dying on us out in the middle of nowhere… 🙂 And can I just say there were suicide rabbits like no other? They were everywhere and would run right into us on so many occasions… Crazy!! We did see hundreds of them (if not even thousands) and then saw a way cute Desert Fox that was also seriously considering suicide – luckily he decided against it (my poor friend had to listen to me talk to all of these animals to stay off the road and not run in front of the truck – not that any of them heard me, since my window was up… hahaha 🙂 ). We also saw a group of bucks (deer) standing in the middle of the road, having a pow wow… Not sure what the wildlife is thinking out there but one thing was sure they aren’t too worried about two ladies in a truck driving around in the middle of the night… 🙂 After being beaten to death by the potholes, ditches and washboard we finally made it back into wendover around 2:30am… All I can say a bed has never felt so nice… 🙂
All in all I think it was a marvelous adventure and if you are ever nearby you should definitely check out the sun tunnels… Just don’t take the dirt road back… 🙂
Have a lovely day everyone,
Heike
(HB1 Photography)
