Death Valley, the Panamint Range and Zabriskie Badlands. Death Valley National Park, California. February 20, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning light on the badlands of Zabriskie Point, Death Valley, and the Panamint Range – Death Valley National Park, California.

I just returned from a four-day shoot in Death Valley in rather “interesting” conditions for the most part. While it isn’t supposed to be as hot in Death Valley at this time of year as it will be later on, it was a bit more wintry than one might usually expect – nothing out of the realm of the ordinary, but in many ways closer to one of the sharp points at the end of the bell curve. On the first two nights it snowed in the peaks around the valley, perhaps down to 4000′ of elevation or even a bit lower. And it was cold even during the day when I drove up into the surrounding ranges – I experienced quite a bit of weather in the low thirties and drove through some light snow on several occasions.

The weather is part of the story behind this photograph, and it is also one of several I made on this trip that reminded me how important serendipity is in landscape photography. I don’t mean to imply that planning doesn’t matter, or that if you just make enough photographs that eventually you’ll get lucky. What I mean is that there are so many variables at work in the living landscape that a photographer would have to be semi-deluded to think that we can actually be successful purely on the basis of careful planning. (OK, I’ll accept the notion of “preparing for serendipity.”) As prepared as we can be, once “out there” in the landscape there are so many unpredictable and uncontrollable elements that an important part of what we do, I think, is to take advantage of fleeting opportunities before they pass – a combination of being aware of them when they occur, being technically and otherwise ready to work with them, and then acting quickly and relatively intuitively.

The story on this morning is roughly as follows. I woke up well before dawn with a general plan of taking a look at what I could see of the weather in complete darkness and then picking from one of several morning possibilities that I had thought about then night before. I got up and drove a ways to where I had a broad view of the Valley in both the north and south direction and tried to figure out what might happen. It was quite cloudy – it had rained and snowed a bit overnight and the precipitation wasn’t over with yet. It look a little lighter to the south, so I thought that I’d see what was happening up at Dantes View, where a grand vista of Death Valley is available in clear weather. I had this image of a dusting of snow on the peak as the sun broke through the clouds at dawn to reveal panoramic views.

Reality didn’t quite cooperate. I drove out on the road to Dantes View and it wasn’t getting any clearer. In fact, the peaks were still quite socked in. As I got closer it began to snow, and before long it was cold enough that the snow on the road was sticking. I soon arrived at the last section of the climb, which claims to feature 15% grades, and thought better of driving up this slick road… in falling snow… and into thick clouds. The odds of sunrise light were essentially zero. So I turned around with a vague idea of heading down the way I had come until I found some light. A couple miles down things cleared enough that I could get some shots of distant snow covered ridges in morning light, and a bit further on I was able to make a stitched panorama of the Valley.

I kept going. I had vowed that I would not go near Zabriskie Point on this trip unless something really interesting or unusual happened, but I stopped in the parking lot when I reached it just to take a look around. It was past the standard and popular dawn light period (not that there had been any!) and most photographers were leaving as I arrived. But I’ve shot here before enough to know that sometimes interesting stuff happens later, and I thought that the cloud shadows on the Panamints across the Valley looked like they were starting to thin. I wanted to photograph one particular wash on the Panamints, but it was obscured by intervening hills so I wandered a bit to the north looking for a better view of the spot. I finally found it and had a long lens focused on a tight shot of this area when all of a sudden shafts of light came through the clouds and lit up the folds in the gully right below me just as the first light was hitting the flats on the far side of the Valley. I quickly moved to a shorter focal length and recomposed to include this gully, and made this photograph in the minute or so of this light.

If I claimed that this is the shot I planned to produce when I started out early on this morning… I would be lying.

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