This one place that everyone should try to see. Must get there in the Mid-morning. The Cathedral is in a canyon. Across the 100 feet of the bottom of the canyon is a reddish-yellow vertical canyon wall. The Cathedral is usually in the shade, but for about an hour in mid-morning the sunlight reflects off the canyon wall and into the Cathedral, turning it golden, thus the moniker.

I have been blessed with exquisite timing once in a while while photographing. This image is one of those times. Sherry, my wife, was waiting for me taking pictures of the cathedral, then tapping her toes impatiently while eating her early lunch. I'm about ready to pack up and eat my lunch, when all of a sudden a woman rappels down out of the hole in the top of the cathedral. Wow. Point of interest and providing a sense of scale all in one!!!

The 9 mile RT hike begins on top of a canyon and descends down to the desert. On the hike through the desert, up and down hills, one has to wade through the Escalante River twice. Mid thigh.

When we started, it was chilly on top of the canyon- mid-April. I had chosen to take an extra lens, rather than an extra water bottle, due to the cool weather when we started. I was an experienced desert rat, or so I thought.

On the way back, the temps rose to around 100F at the lower elevations in the desert. I ran out of water with about 4 miles to go. By the time I was about 3 miles from the pretty steep half mile incline (~500 feet elevation gain) to get back to the car, I was suffering. Sherry shared the little water she had left with me in sips until she was really low on water.

2 miles away, I started hallucinating mildly and stopped sweating. I had to rest about every 1/4 mile.

Then with a mile to go, I really started hallucinating and had convulsive dry heaves and began shivering.

Had to rest every 100 yards, but kept going. A few people passed us as I was sitting down with the dry heaves, but no one stopped to ask if I was okay.

I made it without help (other than Sherry), but I will never, ever forget what it took me (with my stupidity) to capture that image.

Please enjoy the download to see the rappeller. And get there before Trump allows an oil and gas rig in the middle.

Seems like a lot of snobbery or snarkiness here. At the end of the day, the photo is either evocative or not. Those who view your photos, for the most part, don't care about how you got there. They don't care, or know about your equipment, either.
I have zillions of perfectly exposed and sharp shots of birds, cars, planes, etc. Just records of what I saw.
The photo below was taken with a Canon 5d and 17-40L. It was raining very hard, as it was the beginning of another hurricane. Got home to find that the rain on my lens spoiled the sharpness and clarity of the photo. It turned out to be one of my favorite beach photos. Yep, accidentally. There's a lesson there. I really don't care whether or not someone else likes it, or sees it as art. I like it.

If you think you're going to change the world or even the small UHH virtual portion of it, you're going to be as disappointed as most ....

The two things you can control is how you evolve your vision of your photography work and how / if you respond to others. Although you can influence others, you can't control their responses to your work except by not sharing at all. Don't let the naysayers, who tend to be the more vocal online, influence your own sense of self.

If you get caught into every up vs down, left vs right argument on UHH, you're wasting time that would be better spent shooting and editing, learning and sharing. Expressing a worry about whether to process or not seems to indicate you've been listening to voices that may be loud but tend to have nothing useful to say.