Vics Blog

Utah offers some of the most beautiful landscapes to photograph in the United States. The wildness of the place is almost unimaginable and it is peppered with national parks and monuments including Arches, Canyon lands, Bryce, Capitol Reef, Glen Canyon, Grand Staircase Escalante and Zion. Tucked between these awesome places are numerous state parks and Indian reservations which possess fascinating treasures for the eyes to behold at every turn.
A few years back I’d seen an inspiring photograph of a old Anasazi ruin that really captured my interest. It was of an ancient rock house tucked underneath a stone cliff that literally looked like it was erupting into flames of fire. I knew it had to be located somewhere in the southwestern part of the country but couldn’t remember its name or a place to start looking. After several hours of researching cliff dwellings and their locations on the internet, I happened upon the same picture I’d seen before. The ruin was called “Firehouse” and after some more digging, it was indeed located several miles west of Blanding, Utah.
One of the magazines I shoot for needed some pictures of desert big horn sheep so Wayne Morine and I hired a guide and planned a trip to the Superstition Mountains just east of Phoenix in late April. We thought we’d take an extra day along the way and find the Firehouse. All the research said that if you wanted to get the best shots they had to be taken between late October and February so that reflections from below the ruin would light up the flames of sandstone in the overhanging cliff. It was also very specific that early morning or late afternoon gave the best chance of capturing the fiery display.
We got away from Ft. Collins very early, but after seven hours of driving we were running late. It took additional time to find the hidden turn off of Utah highway 95 on to a rutty, dirt road that led to the trailhead. After another mile of hiking through a canyon of dust and sink holes we found the ruin at around one p.m. but the afternoon had turned overcast. There was a couple sitting near the base of the dwelling and they informed us that they hadn’t taken a shot because the light had been flat all day long. The little stone house wasn’t much higher than four or five feet and we wondered how short the natives must have been who lived there.
We shuffled around the area for a few disappointing minutes and found some ancient pictographs on some of the surrounding rocks but the light was terrible. All the luck was against us. Wrong time of the year, wrong time of the day and clouds. We were just about to hike back out when our fortunes completely changed in about two seconds. The sky cleared and for some unknown reason the light turned fabulous. We swore we could hear native Indian chanting in the wind as the ancient resident ghosts taking pity on us. The stone cliff seemed to change into flame and we took several hundred pictures in the next two hours. Sometimes you just get the good breaks. Click