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Conservation/Environment, Ideas, Locations, News, Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Southern California, Thinking Aloud

Death Valley on My Mind

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Wash and Alluvial Fan
Morning light on a giant alluvial fan at the base of a desert mountain wash.

Wash and Alluvial Fan. © Copyright 2023 G Dan Mitchell.

Morning light on a gigantic alluvial fan at the base of desert mountains, Death Valley National Park.

This morning I am waking up in a place that is almost literally on the other side of the world from my “home country” of California. As I look out the window from a home in Kosovo toward high mountains at the start the day I am thinking about the storm impacting my state today, and the deserts regions such as Death Valley are especially on my mind as I read reports of tropical storm Hilary.

Our natural impression of places like Death Valley National Park (the part of California’s desert terrain that I know best) is of dryness, heat, aridity… of places where little grows and where challenges human visitors. It isn’t quite that simple, but there is truth to this. Our biggest concerns in such places are often the heat and the scarcity of water.

But I have long been impressed by the fact that there are few locations where the impact of water is more clearly visible than in the desert, especially in the rugged terrain of places like Death Valley. The valley was once a lake. Remnant water from that lake still appears and flows there. The tremendous mountains on either side of the valley were eroded and formed by water, and monumental alluvial fans flow out of side canyons everywhere. Deep watercourses cut through rock, and a close look at stones reveals that they were moved by water.

Even when we recognize the landscape-forming power of water, we still think of the landscape as now being static — formed by forces that worked in the past but now have left a stable geography. A few rocks fall, occasionally a wash overflows and takes out a small section of a road, a playa may fill temporarily with water… but soon everything is back to “normal” as it was.

But this morning it sounds like we may experience much more profound changes as Hilary sweeps though, the sort that occur at intervals measured centuries. Those of us who love this landscape may find our access cut off and that much changes after this storm. I’m both excited by and fearful of these effects — but in any case this is a powerful reminder of the scale of the forces at work in these places we love.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

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Ideas, Morning Musings, Stories

How It Began, Plus a Book Recommendation

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After recommendations from friends, this week I finally began to read ” The High Sierra: A Love Story,” by Kim Stanley Robinson. I’m only a few chapters in as I write this, but already the book stirs up a lot of memories and thoughts about decades in the Sierra. Both of the trips he describes in the first few chapters take me right back to important places I’ve been. In fact, his transforming first trip literally took him to where I went on my similar trip a few years earlier.

The liner notes state that Robinson was “transformed” after he “first ventured into the Sierra Nevada mountains (sic) during the summer of 1973.” That got me thinking about my introduction to these mountains — and also about other people who know this range deeply and in different ways after decades of experience in the range.

My first backpack trip was, of course, in the Sierra, way back in the summer of 1968. I was 16 and — to my retrospective amazement — our parents dropped me and two of my buddies of the same age off at a trailhead. We hiked over Rockbound Pass into what is now part of the Desolation Wilderness for a trip that was, to the best of my memory, five days long. I had dreamed of such a trip for what seemed to my young mind like forever, and I still recall the magical first view of someone’s backpacking campsite at a lake just beyond the pass. (We managed to get semi-lost on the last day, but that’s a story for another time.)

But wait, that was not my first visit to the Sierra. My father, a transplanted New Yorker by way of the Midwest, aspired to backpack in the Sierra, though I don’t think he was ever quite up to it. I recall that he picked up bits and pieces of gear for the trail, and I now think he was responding to the same fascinations that I developed in my youth, though he never quite managed to get “out there” in the backcountry. 

A few years before that crossing of Rockbound Pass with my buddies, he tried to take me and one of my brothers on a pack trip. My memory is now incomplete, but I think that we rented a “mountain tent,” backpacks and sleeping bags, and who knows what else. We got as far as the Tuolumne Meadows campground, but then — if I’m not merging multiple memories — we had “weather” and retreated to the wood-stove-equipped tents at the Tuolumne Meadows Lodge. Truthfully, that was pretty magical, too.

But that wasn’t my first Sierra experience either. Though we weren’t really a camping family — I think my mother actually hated it, but went along — we car-camped at places ranging from Lassen NP to Sequoia NP. 

But the first real Sierra trip I (vaguely) remember was to Yosemite Valley. I’d love to share a stirring tale of seeing the Valley for the first time, but if it happened I don’t remember. I do remember being awed by the raging Merced River behind our (now gone) motel in El Portal, and I recall the rituals of the Yosemite Firefall, the feeling of looking into the great valley from Glacier Point (the old lodge still stood!), and a fearful moment of being chased back into the family van by a black bear.

But the first memory of the Sierra? This comes from our family’s first experience in the state, and may actually have been a stop on the drive from Minnesota to California when my parents moved here in 1956. We stopped at Lake Tahoe, and I distinctly recall a view the lake from an area along its shoreline. Later I saw an area — perhaps it was El Dorado Beach? — that sure seems to fit my memory, though the memories of four-year-olds are not to be fully trusted. Today it is not a magical place, but in my memory it surely was.

On a trip into the backcountry with friends this past summer, we passed — OK, we were passed by! — groups of young backpackers. I recognized the younger me in them, and I thought about people like the current me that I had encountered on the trail when I was their age. (I guess that makes me an old man of the mountains now!) I thought about the experience being young and encountering the Sierra as a new place, a blank slate for making unimaginable memories, with no idea of where this might lead. And I thought about what it means to be at the far end of that adventure, now full of accumulated experiences, memories, and stories. And I wondered if I could possibly explain to them the potential of the journey that they might be starting and how deeply it might affect them. (I resisted the temptation to actually stop them on the trail and try to explain, you’ll be happy to hear, as will my own kids! ;-) )

So, these mountains have been part of my life for a long time. And I’m not the only one. If you look around, there’s a good chance that someone you encounter was also “transformed” by a long experience with this remarkable Range of Light.

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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.

Blog | About | Twitter | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

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All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Ideas

On The Nature of Creative Work

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For some time I have been thinking of writing about a particular challenge that comes with doing creative work. It is a complicated subject, but sometimes writing about such a topic “primes the pump” for further consideration, so in this post I’m going to take a first — and almost stream-of-consciousness — look at the issue.

(As such, don’t expect a complete coverage here. That would take a book. Or several books. And I’m not about to write them! Also, I’ve updated this post by adding a wonderful reference to the subject through the perspective of composer John Adams.)

The day after writing this I read an article about composer John Adams, in which he responds to essentially the same question that I’m dealing with here:

While many things may be gained from experience, Adams says he is sot sure if the very act of composing gets any easier with age. 

”It depends on the day you ask me. Today, I could say it’s very difficult. But I can say that the one benefit of growing older is that you have a personal history of your own struggles. “

“If you have fought the battle in the past, when you have a block, you know it likely will not last, if you keep working. When you’re thirty years old, or twenty five years old, and you have a block, you think that’s the end of the world. You just can’t imagine success for yourself. So that’s the only thing I can say.”

It has been my good fortune to live and work in and around two creative fields: music and photography. (For those don’t know, my academic background is in music and I had a long career as a college music faculty member.) I have had plenty of opportunities to observe and experience the creative life, with all of its rewards and challenges. It is the relationship between some of the rewards and challenges that will figure in what follows.

If you do creative work, it is almost certain that you hope to experience the intense “high” that may come with it, a kind of intensity and exhilaration. Perhaps you have felt that in the work of others and you hope the work you create will evoke that response. You want to feel the sense of competence and even transcendence that can come from successful work. Perhaps you want to be like creatives who have influenced you.

Continue reading On The Nature of Creative Work →