Week 6: A Much Needed Break

 

Last week my partner and I took 36 hours off and, among other places, visited Joshua Tree National Park. I hadn’t been in a desert in a long time. I was immediately blown away by the beautiful landscapes and arid ground. One of my favorite activities that weekend was hiking up Mount Ryan. This photo was taken on the way down. Look at that sunset! Isn’t it just breathtaking? At least it was for me. I couldn't stop staring at the different colors in the sky and probably shouldn’t have looked directly at the sun for as long as I did but I found it hard to help myself. It was as if the sun was burning itself out. I thought about our lighting class and finally saw how cool the color of sunlight really is. I know we discussed it and I believed it but didn’t really see it. When I look at this picture, I see it. Especially when I compare it to the yellow edges of the sunlight and the orange brushstrokes in the sky. The more I look at the picture, the more I try to count every color in it. Even though the sun is a harsh light here and an imposing presence, it sends such soft strokes of light to the rest of the sky and there is something calming about it. When I took this picture I also had an instant flashback slide show of other wonderful hikes in different parts of the world. I remembered hiking with a recently sprained ankle because I just had to check out a particular glacier in Iceland, hiking in a cloud forest in Costa Rica because I had heard there was a hidden waterfall, I remembered my knees hurting on a very steep and lengthy downhill hike in Bali, I remembered the rainy hikes up mountains in the Lake District in England, hiking for hours to get to a castle in impossible heat in Latvia, deciding it made more sense to hike for about ten hours in Panama to get from one town to the next than take three different buses... Suddenly I was filled with joy and a very big urge to travel.