Being a college faculty member I’m fortunate to get some time off for spring break around the beginning of April. During the past few years I’ve headed to Death Valley National Park to do a bit of photography during the first week of April, and this year was no exception. The plan this year was to meet my brother at Stovepipe Wells on April 1 – he had already been in the area for about a week – and then spend the next four days hitting some of the many interesting photographic sites in and around the Valley.

I’m still going through the hundreds of frames I exposed. I posted one here earlier this week, and many are already in the queue for around the beginning of May. (These are already in my gallery and/or posted at my Flickr gallery.) I thought I’d offer a bit of an overview of this year’s trip, along with some comments on locations, shooting in The Valley, and the successes and frustrations of this shoot.

Day 1

Although I left the SF Bay area fairly early in the morning, I didn’t arrive at Stovepipe Wells until fairly late in the afternoon. Entering via Wildrose Canyon and taking time to explore a bit up there delayed me a bit more. By the time I got my “camp” (basically a tent and a sleeping bag) set up at Stovepipe and finished dinner with my brother, evening was not far away. We had just enough time to drive over to the nearby Death Valley Dunes (a.k.a. Stovepipe Dunes) and wander into the periphery of the section of lower dunes to the south and east of the highest dunes. We continued shooting later than you might expect – and the soft post-sunset light created some subtle color shades that are missing earlier. (Photo at right: Stovepipe Dunes, Evening. Death Valley National Park, California. April 1, 2008. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.)

Day 2

Very early the next morning – long before dawn – we awoke and drove over the pass to the east to visit the ghost town of Rhyolite, Nevada. Rhyolite is just outside the park on BLM land, and has been pretty much abandoned for the better part of a century. Several old and rather impressive buildings are partially standing, and other remnants of the days when Rhyolite was a thriving town are still found. We arrived just before sunrise and shot for a few hours. The light was challenging, with some high clouds obscuring the direct sun – but in the end this worked to our advantage. Patience was rewarded when the sun did occasionally break through and light up the scenes, but the clouds added interest to the sky and softened the light. (Photo at left: Bank Building Ruins. Rhyolite, Nevada. April 2, 2008. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.)

By the time we finished up in Rhyolite it was after 10:00… and we still had not eaten. We headed east to the nearby town of Beatty, Nevada – where gas was at least $.20/gallon less than anywhere else on the trip! – and grabbed breakfast in the local casino’s coffee shop before heading back to Death Valley. (One thing you quickly discover when photographing Death Valley is that you are going to do a lot of driving, and often the distances are great and roads not so great.)

Although the most obvious photography opportunities in DV are generally very early and very late in the day, sometimes you can find decent midday shooting opportunities in some of the narrow canyons, so we headed up to Mosaic Canyon around noon. In retrospect, although I did get some decent photographs here, I think that a bit earlier in the morning might be a better bet – perhaps in the 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. time frame.

We killed a few hours in the afternoon, waiting for cooler temperatures and better light. The plan was to shoot the salt flats near Badwater, and we headed down that direction about 5:00 or so, stopping just a bit south of the Badwater tourist area. For the second time on a Death Valley visit, I was fortunate to encounter conditions where there were clouds above the Panamint Mountains across the Valley from here in the late afternoon, and again on this trip the sun began to send light beams through these clouds onto the lower slopes of the Panamints as the evening approached. This is a beautiful but tricky thing to photograph. The backlit haze only allows a very soft view of the east side of the Panamints to be seen, and the sun on the clouds above is extremely bright. I shot some long lens shots that I combined in PS after returning home. (Photo at right: Light Beams Over the Panamint Mountains. Death Valley National Park, California. April 2, 2008. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.) After shooting this scene quickly – before the light disappeared – from the road we headed down onto the salt flats to photograph the well-known salt pans with the Panamints in the background. I find this scene to be incredibly difficult to photograph – and I have a great respect for those who have created compelling images here – for both aesthetic and technical reasons.

Day 3

Our shooting destination for Thursday morning – by brother’s last before heading out to Las Vegas to catch a homeward flight – was a bit of an experiment. On my way into the Valley I had visited Wildrose Canyon high in the Panamint Range, and had driven a good distance up the road before I decided that driving the gravel road in snowy (!) conditions by myself might not be a good idea. Along this route, perhaps a mile above the Wildrose camp, I saw a view to the northwest that included the Sierra crest around Mt. Whitney and I thought that it might make a compelling shot in the right dawn light. So that was the shot we were looking for when we arrived at this high and cold spot before dawn. While it is a high and beautiful place, the Photography Gods were apparently busy elsewhere on this morning – and the pink illumination of the Sierra crest that I imagined never happened. Ah, well… not every sunrise can be equally stunning.

By midday we were back in the Valley at our Stovepipe Wells camp. I left my brother to complete his final packing, and I headed down to Salt Creek to see about photographing the pupfish and some of the other wildlife that can occasionally be found around this source of (very salty) water. From here I did another long drive – up to Beatty for gas and then back into the park via the astonishing Titus Canyon route. In retrospect I’m considering this more or less a scouting trip for a future return trip to Titus Canyon since I took few photographs. But what an astonishing drive. Frankly, it competes with anything I’ve seen in any other national park. The first part of the drive isn’t all that astonishing as the dirt road covers an approach route from the east across typical high desert terrain. But as the road approaches the crest of the Grapevine Mountains of the Amargosa Range the terrain becomes very impressive in many ways. The curved slopes of high desert valleys are topped by huge rocky peaks, and the road creeps along some big drop-offs and over a couple of narrow passes. Further down and closer to the outlet of Titus Canyon the terrain is close to unbelievable – the canyon narrows down to the point that it is just wide enough for a single vehicle and the almost perfectly vertical canyon walls tower hundreds of feet above.

I emerged from Titus Canyon late in the afternoon and figured I might have just enough time to make it to another spot I’ve wanted to visit, Aguereberry Point. The point is far up in the Panamint Range with a stunning view of the floor of Death Valley thousands of feet below. It seems that a good time to photograph this scene is late afternoon and very early evening as the shadows of the Panamint Range are just beginning to extend into the Valley to the east. (Photo at right: Death Valley from Aguereberry Point. Death Valley National Park, California. April 3, 2008. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.)

Day 4

Friday would be my final day in the Valley, and I planned a return visit to Death Valley Dunes, though this time in the morning and with more time to wander out among them. I was up at my usual early hour and heading out to the dunes well before sunrise. I chose to approach them from a point closer to Stovepipe Wells and more or less wound around behind the dunes rather than heading for the popular and relatively crowded high point. (Though even here there was a fairly large number of photographers.) By going a bit beyond the dunes I was able to photograph the early light without a lot of other photographers in the scene. As I was wrapping up my shoot – or so I thought – I somewhat aimlessly wandered up the slope of nearby dune and noticed that the light from the rising sun was just barely starting to light the tops of the ripples in the sand and that Tucki Mountain rose above this scene and that some interesting clouds were about to float over the mountain. I stopped, set up, and waited – and in the end got one of my favorite photographs from the trip. (Photo at left: Stovepipe Dunes, Tucki Mountain, and Morning Clouds. Death Valley National Park, California. April 4, 2008. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.)

Finishing up here, I finally broke camp and headed out of the park in the middle of the day – not for home, but for Southern California. But that is a story for another time…