Eclipse Party 2023

By Steph Davis

By KAVU

October 24^th, 2023

I’ve never seen an eclipse, and it was very exciting to hear that a solar eclipse would be happening on October 14, and the prime viewing spot would be right over my cabin at Indian Creek at the very best time of year to climb at Indian Creek! Luckily I got lots of pairs of eclipse glasses because without any real planning, a few of my best friends spontaneously decided to come and see it with us:

Suddenly it was an eclipse party!

Everyone was pretty excited, and the town of Moab was braced for an eclipse explosion. We decided to go down to my place the night before, in case it was impossible to drive (something many people were warning about) on the morning of the eclipse. It would be at its height at about 10:30 in the morning. We didn’t want to take any chances, but it did seem a bit unlikely that the roads would become gridlocked—I was a little bit curious if this was going to be like Y2K where we were braced for the apocalypse and then nothing really happened?

Nonetheless, we wanted to camp out anyway, so we all got together on Friday night and went to bed pretty early. I wanted to see the sunrise, and get the whole experience on Saturday morning….

We’d been warned that an annular eclipse isn’t quite as dramatic as a total eclipse. With an annular it’s like a ring of fire since the whole center of the sun gets blocked by the moon. I don’t know, that sounded pretty dramatic to me!

At about 9:30 am with the eclipse glasses on, we could start to see a little black bite moving down over the sun. And it gradually moved all the way down until 10:30. The main thing we noticed when not using the glasses was that the temperature dropped quite a bit, and although it was still light out, it seemed dimmer, as though there were a cloud over the sun. Apparently this would be why a total eclipse would be a lot more “dramatic”, because it would be a lot more dark. Still, it seemed pretty darn amazing to me!!

A reminder of what an incredible and bizarre world we are living in, in a huge expanse of space, and how tiny we are in the cosmos.

We also watched the moon move down over the sun, basically reversing the whole process, and then it was sunny again and like it had never even happened….and so, we went climbing :)