Around Hanksville

For a long time, I thought Hanksville was basically a gas station, a place where you turn left to descend through 70 miles of wilderness on the drive from Moab to Bullfrog, en route to Glen Canyon. Sure, I knew there was some outpost in the region that prepared aspiring astronauts for life on Mars. Which should have told me something about the prospects for landscape photography.

It was only when planning a return to Cathedral in the Desert that I thought of Hanksville as a place to stay and break up the long final day’s journey back to SLC. By this time I knew there were rough dirt roads surrounding the town like a spider web, with sights to be seen like Factory Butte and the Moonscape Overlook.

On that trip in October 2025, my sunrise photographs from Factory Butte were so-so, and we couldn’t even find the Overlook, but it was okay, because by then I’d already committed to a May 2026 photography workshop with Eric Bennett and Joseph Rossbach, whose work I knew to be glorious. Eric’s book “Space, Stillness, Silence” depicted the San Rafael Swell and its neighbor, the Caineville/Mancos Shale badlands near Hanksville, in soft-hued minor chords far removed from the clashing cymbals and bugle blasts of so much Desert Southwest Golden Hour photography. It was the inverse of the pictures in Arizona Highways: gentle, evocative, not souped-up saturation and dramatic contrast. I thought I might learn a lot from this workshop, and it turned out I did.

See the pictures below as emanations from a new appreciation of the Blue Hour, and a greater sensitivity to soft light. Within a 60-mile radius of the tiny town of Hanksville there are bentonite hillsides and the moon-like surface of a desert floor, gargantuan buttes and sudden drops into lush riverine canyons. It is all more like Rilke’s The Sonnets to Orpheus — “And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared” — than his Duino Elegies where “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and are awed by because it so serenely disdains to destroy us.” See these pictures as clues taken from a quiet quarter of the West, its light and features not less dramatic, but in their beguiling way, more.

As always, click on any image to enlarge it. With gratitude to Joe and Eric, who were skilled and generous in their guidance.