Day 1: Sunrise

Did you know that two days after the Summer Solstice the sky gets light at 5:00 in the morning? I had no idea. Just as the sunlight stretched until well after 9:00 the night before, the day started to return well before the sun actually came up.

We left our house at 4:30, on a road filled with taillights and streetlights, wondering at all the people who seemed to have somewhere to go this early in the morning. The outline of the mountains on the right caught my attention - how could I see them so early? By 5:00, the answer was evident: the sun was coming up.

At first just a lightening along the edges of the mountains, then gradually a variation of color in the Eastern half of the sky. Like watching a sunset in reverse, I saw the light blue turn a faint greenish-gray color, then hints of yellow and orange appeared. Everything was pale, undertones of gray muting the colors. The clouds hovering above the mountains were alternately silhouetted by the light and illuminated from below. As we turned away from the mountains and headed across the West desert, I looked back to see real light beginning to build.

The distant mountains of the Salt Lake Valley became a scalloped edge of the flat desert with sudden beams of orange and yellow behind it. The bundled clouds turned lavendar and coral, and the empty Salt Flats took on a rosy hue. With the rushing of the car, the plains became rippled, like light on water. What was once empty space had become something lovely.

By 6:30 the sun was completely up, the landscape filled with normal hues and colors, the dramatic shading and coloring of the sunrise a fading memory. I fell asleep with the green sagebrush whipping past us and the blue sky above, yellow sunlight slanting across the car windows.