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Today's picture is another old image from our trip to southern Utah’s beautiful Arches National Park. As a landscape icon, the delicate arch requires no introduction, it's usually featured in all its glory on almost all tourism-related documents created by Utah and even the United States travel brochures. The day we decided to hike up there, we had some beautiful light as the sun went down both on the arch and the snow-capped mountains in the background.
The hike to get to the location is a short but involves following a trail that mostly lays over a large flat rock which is devoid of many markers even in broad daylight. A thing to keep in mind if you plan to return after the sun goes down like we did. We were there in the middle of winter on a moonless night and my plan was to track my hike using the all trails app and then follow the path back to the car. We kept our iPhones charged and were completely confident that we will be able to get back as we stayed to take some beautiful star-filled nightscapes. Regrettably, we failed to account for the thinness obsession phone makers have these days that fails to give the phone batteries any cold protection. As soon as we took our phones out to check the paths, the phone battery went from mid 80% to zero and the phones died and became unresponsive. We were left to trace back our way in complete darkness without any way to identify the hiking trail and while wandering we met a couple of other hikers who were in the same predicament. Fortunately, we found a way to get off the rock soon and was able to get back to the marked trail to the parking lot. We learned a valuable lesson that day regarding preparedness in the desert and how quickly a situation can turn against you.