12/01/2025
The endless ridges and shadows of Utah’s Factory Butte, towering over the San Rafael swell, shot with a Mini 4 Pro.
Here’s a silly little story about taking these photos and videos: We had slept the previous night, literally on some rocks by the Colorado River, and then drove to Factory Butte to fly our drones. and I were flying, and taking our shots for like an hour. At one point, I dropped down REALLY close to the ground, into one of the deep channels, and just went full speed ahead, like I was trying to torpedo the Death Star.
The next thing I know, the signal cuts out, and it never returns. I must have misjudged my altitude and crashed into the surface. 😔 That’s not the end of the world, I’ve lost drones before, but this one had the previous two days of photos and videos on it. So I was going to have to hike out into the desert to go find it.
But first- we needed a quick bathroom break. So we drove a couple miles away to the nearest bathroom. Then we got distracted by an mtb line we spotted for to ride (I’ll post that later this month), so we were gone a solid hour.
When we returned to start our drone retrieval hike, we found the drone parked in the exact spot that we had been parked in. Apparently it hadn’t crashed at all, I just lost signal and the signal never came back! But after 30 mins of just hovering in place, it did what it was supposed to do- returned to the exact spot where it took off from. 😂
