While my daughter Annie and I travel around the West visiting parks and historic sites we like to make sure and find one or two lesser known parks on each of our travel days. Annie is particularly good at finding these and yesterday was no exception, with a great slot canyon hike at Capitol Reefs and a quick visit to Natural Bridges National Monument, a true hidden gem…

Located in Southeast Utah, sort of halfway between Bryce and Arches if you take the long but scenic backroads, Natural Bridges is a relatively tiny park, which makes it very approachable for a quick stop once you get there. The nine mile auto-route is a pleasure to drive and features three stunning examples of true natural bridges. Unlike many of the so-called “natural bridges” which are often haphazard piles of rock that refuse to fall down, these are all truly carved from old sandstone by rivers.

If you have the time (which we didn’t, unfortunately) the park also features great trails where you can walk down to the bridges and to the Horsecollar ruins Native American historic site where you can see millennium old dwellings set into the niches in the cliff face. When we arrived the park and overlooks were almost empty, although the campground, like almost all the rest we saw on our trip, was full.

For photography morning would have been a much better time, as the bridges are mostly to the west of the overlooks, so our evening shots were all backlit. But as you can see from the attached image, even at poor time of day for shooting the bridges are impressive. The opening in the pictured Supapai Bridge is over 200 feet high and 200 feet wide and the bridge itself is over 50 feet thick and 30 feet wide.

To accommodate the back light I did shoot a bracketed set of three frames which I threw together in Photomatix Pro. I also used a little sleight of hand to highlight the bridge for you in the image by running nik’s Tonal Contrast filter over the image and brushing it on only over the bridge. Unfortunately none of that corrects for the vastly different white balance in the shady and sunny areas of the photo. That’d take more work in Photoshop or a revisit of the park in the morning!

Next we’re off to Arches, one of the most stunning locations I’ve photographed, but it was worth the few hour delay in our arrival to take advantage of this hidden gem of the Western US.