Snowbird Resort, Little Cottonwood Canyon, Wasatch Mountains, Utah

The glacier-carved past of Little Cottonwood Canyon is evident in this moonlit photograph looking down the canyon with the lights of the Salt Lake Valley glowing in the distance. Taken from a ridge high above the town of Alta at midnight, the lights of Snowbird Village can be seen at the bottom right of the photograph. Several 20-minute exposures were made before this final image was captured using only the light of the full moon to illuminate the scene. Twenty thousand years ago, during the height of the Pleistocene glaciers, this canyon was filled to a depth of over one thousand feet with glacial ice. During this period, the terminus of Little Cottonwood glacier calved huge icebergs into the waters of Lake Bonneville at the bottom of the canyon.