Evening Dust and Rain. Death Valley National Park, California. March 28, 2016. © Copyright 2016 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Desert hills in evening dust storm and rain, Death Valley.
In retrospect I saw the first hints of where this day was headed way back at dawn. We went to a high and remote place overlooking the expanse of Death Valley before dawn. As we arrived there was a brief burst of very colorful light, but then clouds mostly muted the colors, and I noticed a distant glowing softness to the atmosphere which muted distant objects. I’ve seen this before at the start of days when dust storms developed. Indeed, by late morning, even though we were still high in the mountains we began to see towers of blowing dust in the distance and soon even the air up in the mountains took on the misty, soft quality that comes when dust blows in from a distance.
By mid-afternoon we left the mountains and headed back towards the valley lowlands, and before we got there we ran into tremendous winds and dust that filled the atmosphere and blocked the view in all directions. At time the dust was so thick that it “rained” sand and small pebbles. We arrived back at our starting point to wind so strong and dust so thick that we could only retreat and try to minimize the intrusion of dust and sand as the wind storm raged. In the early evening the winds began to abate and we looked outside to see a mysterious scene of dark, apocalyptic clouds of dust and rain falling over the mountains. A sane person might have stayed inside, but we couldn’t resist heading out into this wonderfully bizarre and evocative atmosphere of dying wind, blowing dust, suspended haze, clouds, and big drops of rain. As sunset approached, the conditions began to break up and the clouds thinned, and light passed through the thick atmosphere to reveal the shapes of clouds and the vague contours of desert mountains.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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