Two Rocks, Morning – Racetrack Playa. Death Valley National Park, California. April 3, 2006. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

This is my all time favorite photograph from the Racetrack Playa. A combination of factors all came together at this precise moment to make this work. First of all, I actually had to be at the Playa, which is no small task in and of itself. From my San Francisco Bay Area location this is a round trip drive of well over 1000 miles, the last 30 miles of which is a two-hour adventure on an extremely washboarded gravel road. Then, unlike most visitors, I stayed overnight at the playa and got up before dawn to scope out the early light.

Before I took this shot I had already seen these two lonely rocks with the expanse of the playa behind them and the Grandstand and further peaks in the distance. I had made some photographs of this scene that didn’t really work for one reason or another and had then gone on to photograph other examples of the playa’s “moving rocks.” But I wasn’t optimistic on this morning – there was a howling gale blowing across the playa and thick clouds had come up over the tall ridge to the east and the overall lighting was not so great. It was a tremendous wilderness experience – a wild and lonely morning that I would never forget –  but not one that promised great photography.

I did note that the distant peaks to the north were in the sun and that there were some very interesting cloud formations appearing there. Then I saw that the direct sun was beginning to strike the far northern end of the playa, and then gaps began to appear in the thick clouds overhead. Because of the extremely strong winds, beams of light coming through the clouds were flying across the surface of the playa at a high rate of speed, creating rapid changes in its appearance as bands of light and shadow were in constant motion. This was no static landscape!

I remembered the two rocks and quickly located them and set up my gear. While many people may assume that landscape photography is a slow, deliberate process – find a scene and carefully go about getting everything ready to take “the shot” – this was anything but. The entire surface of the playa was constantly changing – light appearing here, a shadow racing past over there, cloud shapes changing in the distance. I made several exposures and this one turned out to be my favorite: the foreground rocks casting sharp shadows from the strong sidelight, a line of shadow across the distant playa near the Grandstand, the cloud shadows on the mountains, and those amazing cloud forms in the distance.

(This is an updated version of a photograph from 2006.)

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.