Chasing Geminids, Part 2

 

“We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”

        -- Joseph Conrad

The Geometry of Dark: Chasing Geminids (Part 2)

There are two BLM campgrounds in Rabbit Valley, ostensibly quiet places to park a truck and watch the universe rotate. The first is Jouflas, usually popular, and boasting a commanding view of the Wingate Sandstone as it plunges beneath the Mancos Shale along the Uncompahgre Escarpment. The second is the Knowles Overlook along the meander of the Colorado River.

My intent was simple: deploy the tripods here at Jouflas and use that plunging formation as a heavy, geologic anchor for the celestial production above. But in photography, as in geology, geometry is destiny. The topography here was not a shield, but a funnel; it allowed the high beams of passing traffic to slice straight into my wide-angle lens. I took a quick latitude and longitude reading, a habit of the trade, then packed up. The photons here were too aggressive. I needed to go deeper.

The Wingate Sandstone

I moved to a horse-trailer lot a short drive farther into the canyons, at the point where the BLM’s stabilization gravel surrenders to dirt. Here, I performed the "folded arm evaluation," standing still, tucking hands into armpits, and waiting to see if the light would be as quiet as the air.

It was full dark now. The sky was still clear, save for a few wispy clouds, the vanguard of a weather system I had been dreading. I scouted a foreground composition, but looking back toward the interstate, the geometry failed me again. A convoy of tractor-trailers painted lines of light across the horizon. It wasn’t enough luminance to hurt the human eye, but for a sensor pushed to ISO 6400, straining to collect light sent to us from stars millions of years old, it was blinding.

So, further south, the road requires focus.

I had not seen or heard a human soul since leaving the pavement. As I walked back to the truck, the silence was broken by a soft rustling in the sagebrush, jackrabbits, likely, utilizing the safety of the dark to secure an evening meal. I opened the back hatch and confirmed the location of the Zoom recorder and its tripod. I didn't just want to see the night; I wanted to capture the friction of it.

I drove south on Rabbit Valley Road, high beams carving a tunnel through the dark. In summer, this road is a river of silty moon-dust. Now, frozen solid, it was a washboard of hardened clay. The ruts didn't squish; they shattered. Navigating them required a specific focus, pick the wrong line, and you drop in, risking a cut sidewall or a broken axle. The 4Runner’s stock lights are well-designed, but I found myself missing the "big eyes" I installed at the front of my old T100, which could turn night into day at the flip of a switch.

The road firmed up in places as the underlying geology shifted, though low spots remain, basins filled with fine dust that turn to mire the moment they get wet. You could see the violence of the past season here: deep ravines where flash floods had eroded the gravel beds, and tracks where OHVs had blasted through the mud during the fall storms. Nature has her contours and will not be denied. Usually, the BLM grooms these routes so the Honda sedan crowd can reach the river, but not in December. The Knowles Overlook Campground was effectively severed from the civilized world for anything less than a high-clearance 4WD.

It is a different world, moving at night. You exist in a bubble of artificial lumens; anything beyond the throw of your headlights might as well be a void. Your best sensor becomes your ear until the lights die and the rhodopsin in your eyes regenerates.

I finally stopped at the McDonald Creek trailhead. I knew this spot. It was protected from the I-70 light pollution by both distance and the shielding topography. The entrance is marked by a massive, pale dome of Navajo Sandstone, a white monolith by day, but now a dark, imposing void outlined against the glowing ribbon of the Milky Way.

Navajo Sandstone Conical Feature

I was parking on a transition zone. Below me lay the Mancos Shale, the gray, crumbly sea-bottom mud that turns into grease when wet and concrete when dry. Above me rose the Navajo, the petrified dunes of a Jurassic desert. I was setting my tripod on a shoreline that hadn't seen water in a hundred million years, waiting to catch dust falling from an asteroid that was arguably older than the rock beneath my boots.

I began setting up the sound recorder first. Immediately, the biophony presented itself: a coyote, close by, yapping and tossing a few sharp barks in my direction. I’m not sure if the recorder caught the conversation or if I stepped on the audio by closing the 4Runner door. I’ll have to inspect the waveform in post-production, looking for the peaks of nature amid the machine's noise.

I switched my headlamp to red mode to preserve my night vision and let the darkness settle in. From here on, the world would be monochrome. I mounted the camera and walked out onto the flats.

I quickly noticed a tall ant hill, a conical mound piled high to insulate the colony. A side note for the curious: these mounds should always be inspected. Ants are the curators of the Mesozoic; they build with sand and fine gravel, often concentrating microfossils and bone fragments in their architecture. If you are hunting for fossils, the ant is your first and most reliable field assistant.

But I was here for the sky, not the dirt. It was 7:45 PM. The Milky Way was high above, though I could see wisps of light streaks painting the zenith. I chose a distant mesa as my foreground anchor, fired up the Nikon, and dialed in the physics: 14mm-28mm f/2.8 Zoom (set wide at 14mm), wide-open aperture set at 2.8, ISO 6400, 30-second shutter speed.

The interval timer was set to fire every 35 seconds. The intent, as always, was to stack these slices of time into a single image, revealing a conical cluster of meteorites raining down from the Gemini Twins Constellation.

I watched Orion’s belt rise, somewhat obscured by the horizon. To the east, a glow from Grand Junction filled the valley floor, light pollution bleeding around the edges of my foreground mesa. A bad omen. I adjusted the composition, placing Orion to the right, hoping to catch the cone of meteor streaks.

At 20:12, I released the interval timer and stepped away.

I looked back at the audio setup. Two small red LEDs on the Zoom recorder stared back at me; it was collecting data from a different spectrum. I had an EcoFlow River battery sitting on a silicon mat to keep the electrons flowing; the standard AA batteries get sketchy in this cold. The X-Y microphone, covered in its "dead cat" fuzzy windscreen, was listening for the wind, the coyotes, and perhaps the silence itself.

I stood in the crisp, flowing air, refreshing my memory of the constellations, using the old night patrol trick of averted vision, looking slightly to the side of the Navajo Sandstone formation to let the light hit the rods in my eyes, revealing the faint glow of the rock.

The Milky Way was a majestic arch overhead. The Galactic Center was currently beneath my feet, looking down on Australia, but the spiral arms were here with me. Airplanes moved across the starfield, their navigation lights blinking in a rhythmic, mechanical counterpoint to the stars. Those streaks would show up in the 30-second exposures, man-made meteors.

But the geometry turned against me once more.

Looking East, where my camera was slowly drinking in the light, I saw wisps of high clouds being chased by lower, heavier masses. They were creeping up over the horizon of the mesa, illuminated from below by the city lights of Grand Junction. The clouds acted as a diffuser, scattering the city's glow and drowning out the starlight. Orion the Hunter was being erased.

I let the camera run its intervals until 2100, then conceded the battle. I moved the tripod, shifting to Plan B: a composition directly overhead, aiming for the zenith where the air was still clear. The peak of the Geminids was predicted for the window between midnight and 0200, but the atmosphere had other plans. The clouds moved with a slow, suffocating inevitability from the southeast, closing the dome.

A little after 2200, I finally switched my headlamp from red back to bright white—a harsh return to modern time. I opened the hatch. The temperature was down to 34°F. It was that specific, tactile cold where you are acutely aware of the exact location of your hands and cheeks.

The sound recorder went in first. The aluminum legs of its tripod were coated in a web of frost, the moisture of the high desert crystallizing as the earth vented some of its residual heat. It flows away, but too subtly for one to notice. I found the same delicate lattice on the camera’s view screen as I collapsed the gear. I performed a final inspection, ensuring the vibration of the rutted road wouldn't rattle the optics apart on the drive back to the interstate.

You cannot force the sky to cooperate, nor can you negotiate with a cloud bank fed by the winter winds. The data capture was possibly a failure. The "hero shot" of the Geminids raining fire over the mesa may not exist on my memory card.

But as I navigated the ruts back toward the pavement, leaving the silence of the canyon for the hum of I-70, I didn't feel a sense of loss. There is a victory in simply being there. You can’t lose when you have the excuse of photography to stand under a diamond dome in the cold, listening to the breathing of the planet. It isn't about the capture; it’s about the witness.

The final image might not be what I planned, but the raw materials, the frost, the coyote's bark, the wind in the dead cat, and the few photons that did make it through the clouds are now mine. Later, in the warmth of the studio, I’ll sift through the digital strata of the evening. I will look for the hidden jewels in the noise, and perhaps find that the story wasn't about the meteors after all, but about the night itself.

(To be continued...)
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