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Surprise Valley, Colorado River, Maze District, mid-morning Canyonlands National Park is a wilderness of rock rivaling the Grand Canyon in richness and complexity. What makes the park special is the opportunity to view its red canyons from above and then travel into them relatively easily, experiencing the profound silence of some of the most remote terrain in the lower 48 states. The park is divided by the Colorado and Green Rivers into three distinct districts: Island in the Sky, the Needles, and the Maze. The detached Horseshoe Canyon is near the Maze. Isolated from one another, each section is accessed by a dead-end road, the distances between which are quite vast—camping in Island in th...

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QT Luong is a full-time photographer from California, known for being the first to photograph all 59 US National Parks - in large format. Ken Burns featured him in "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" (2009). His photographs, published in dozens of countries around the world, have been the subject several magazine profiles, solo gallery and museum exhibits. He the author and photographer of "Treasured Lands: A Photographic Odyssey through America's National Parks" (treasuredlandsbook.com), a large format book where photographs of the 59 US National Parks are augmented with detailed photography locations notes from which this series of articles is drawn.
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