I flew half way around the world from Australia to Utah and then drove through the night in a massive rain-storm to arrive at Zion national park at 5am to quickly grab two hours sleep in the passenger seat of my hire car prior to this shoot.
I had seen some impressive photos of the Zion slot canyons from some fellow photographer friends and I quickly developed an obsession with wanting to get to Utah to shoot ‘the slots’ myself. But I knew it would all be about the light and just hoped we would score some deep within the canyon.
There is no commercial guiding allowed in these canyons and so I fortunately used some magazine contacts to put me in touch with the local canyoneering community, who in turn put me in touch with some visiting French canyoneers who were tackling Pine Creek Canyon.
I only met visiting French canyoneer Francois Silvestri a day before this photo and he allowed me to abseil into a deep natural pool before him (which happened to have a snake swimming in it) so that I could swim to a submerged ledge, allowing me to photograph his rappel and offer some scale to the image.
Pictured here is the resulting image of Francois descending into 'The Cathedral' of Zion’s Pine creek canyon.