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You ever notice how morning comes early almost everywhere. You have to get up pretty darn early to beat the morning. I’ve noticed that this is particularly true when I’m trying for dawn in the Grand Canyon. I wake up to what I think is really early, like middle of the night early, and I’m already late for morning. I think you have to go out there right before dark and just stay there all night to be ready to see morning at it’s proper time. This is dawn in the Grand Canyon, I did it, I got up at the crack of dawn, put on every piece of clothes I brought with me because it is cold, cold, cold on the rim of the canyon in December and went out to shoot the morning light.

It was about 5 AM when I got there and you know what, it was dark out, really dark, there wasn’t even the hint of any morning happening. I hung around and hung around and thought something must be terribly wrong because we weren’t having dawn that morning. Not any. I mean who you gonna call when that happens. That’s right, nobody.  As it turns out all my worrying about making it up in time for dawn was just stupid because dawn doesn’t happen until quarter to nine in the morning in December at the Grand Canyon.

This vantage point was Grandview Point and that’s where and when this picture was taken, December 5, 8:45am. Stay in bed, sleep in, have a cup of tea, drive really slow to the rim and then you get dawn. It’s a really civilized way to have morning. It turns out that every other time I had tried for dawn it had been in the summer time when dawn happens shortly after dusk or so it seems. So lesson learned, ask somebody when dawn is around here as soon as you get there and save yourself a lot of stress. This job is supposed to be fun anyway. By the way this is one of those panorama shots where this picture is made up from 27 single images stitched together into one glorious image just for you. So go ahead and click on it to see it in it’s full glory. We go all out for our readers.