Death Valley, Mountains, Morning. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning light on Death Valley and the base of the Panamint Mountain Range

A few recent photographs here have focused on the intimate landscapes of Death Vally canyons. This one leaves the canyon and moves out into the open, looking from the eastern mountains across valley to the base of the Panamint range on the other side. We had driven up in to these mountains in the morning after first photographing dawn from the valley. Here we could watch the morning light traverse the valley — in the photograph it still had not made it to the low hills below our position.

At about the time of my first visits to Death Valley I had also made my first trips to Alaska. It may seem odd, given their different climates, but it struck me that the two places have a lot in common. Most of all, in both places I experiences huge spaces and immense quiet and stillness in ways that I had not really known before. (I rarely experience this in the Sierra, even above timberline, since the distances are smaller and somewhere in the landscape there will be a tree.) In Death Vally, it is hard to make sense of the scale of the landscape. The combination of huge distances, tremendously large features, and a dearth of objects of known size conspire to confuse us. Look across flats to a barren mountain and its valleys, it might seem that you could just walk there. You could, perhaps, but it might take many days.

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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