Category Archives: Photographs: Death Valley

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Trail Canyon, Dust Storm Haze

April 5, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Trail Canyon and Death Valley obscured by dense morning haze from desert dust storms.

I had never seen a view quite like this one from this spot before, and I don’t recall seeing conditions quite like this in Death Valley National Park. I awoke very early — well before dawn — and headed up into the Panamint Mountains to the west of Death Valley, aiming for a familiar high location with panoramic views. I had several sorts of photographs in mind, including detail photographs of very small components of the larger landscape, the possibility of shooting directly into the light of the rising sun, and photographs of this deep canyon cutting down from the ridges toward the valley floor.

As I headed toward this spot I was surprised by the amount of haze in the air as the first light arrived. When I’ve seen such conditions before dust storms almost always followed, but I didn’t see any evidence of their development on this morning. (Later someone suggested to me that high winds farther to the west might have raised dust there and that it may have travelled over this direction.) I arrived at the summit ridge at around 6000′ expecting to see the view across and perhaps down into Death Valley, but instead I found myself looking down into a soupy haze that filled the Valley to this level and perhaps a bit higher. A short time later the sun rose through this murk and began to backlight it, creating an intense glow in the atmosphere and muting the small details of the mysterious landscape. The great Valley itself was virtually invisible in the thick haze, luminous with the morning backlight slanting in from the east.

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Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Flow Lines, Morning Light

April 4, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Soft early morning light illuminates curving erosion patterns of a desert gully, Death Valley National Park

Today I’m back from my annual spring photography visit to Death Valley National Park. I first visited this place a bit more than 15 years ago, though photography was not the purpose of that first trip. My first view of the Valley was magical. We had arrived the night before and set up camp in the dark at the first camping area we found, a tiny campground near below Towne Pass at the turnoff to Wildrose Canyon. I had little idea where I was nor what my surroundings looked like, as I had literally never been in this place before. Early the next morning I stepped out of my tent and was greeted by an astounding and unexpected view down into the huge and rugged landscape of this Valley, a first sight I will not forget.

Since then I have returned many times — much of that landscape has become familiar to me as I’ve pushed the boundaries of my knowledge of the place outwards in all directions. I’ve been into areas that I didn’t imagine existed on that first visit, and I’ve learned to see past the geology and geography of the place and see the human history of the park and the sometimes-hidden beauties of wildflowers and more. Today when I visit I still look for that astonishing and grand landscape, but I also slow down and stop and look for more subtle things that I surely missed nearly completely on that first visit. This little miniature landscape of curving erosion and stones and first light is one that I would have missed completely on that first visit, but which I now know can be found almost everywhere in this park once I slow down to the pace of the desert and take the time to really look.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Telescope Peak

August 30, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Telescope Peak, the highest point in Death Valley National Park, in the distance beyond the rugged terrain of upper Titanothere Canyon in the Amargosa Range

This one has been sitting in my queue for months now, and it is finally time to send it out with the other photographs! I made the photograph back in early April, while spending a few days in Death Valley exploring a lot of higher elevation area in the mountains on either side of the Valley itself. At one point during this visit, we ended up spending nearly an entire day high up in the Panamint range, at times doing something very unusual — photographing Death Valley wildflowers during a snowstorm!

The distant snow-covered peak in the photograph is Telescope Peak, at over 11,000′ of elevation the highest point in the Panamint range and in Death Valley National Park. While we often think of Death Valley’s reputation for heat, this peak is often covered with snow during the colder times of the year. The location from which I made this photograph is high in the mountains on the other, east side of the Valley, a very arid and rugged region that presents a different appearance than the much lower areas of the Valley itself. Here there is a landscape of dry and rugged mountains and valleys, often receding one behind the other into the distance. I stopped at this spot, where I have photographed before, and was captivated by the conduction of three peak shapes — the nearly peak at upper right, the distant summit of Telegraph Peak, and the peak-like form of the clouds above.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Desert Dawn, Storm Clouds

June 22, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 6 Comments

Layers of dawn clouds from an arriving storm above receding mountains and valleys, Death Valley

This photograph comes from just about two months ago, during a photography visit to Death Valley National Park. It has been a very strange weather year in California, and the strangeness continued on this trip. In early April, almost anything can happen with Death Valley weather… and much of that “anything” occurred while we were there. On this day, the main attractions was… snow!

The night before I had decided that it looked like there might be the potential for interesting light up high in the mountains to the west of the Valley. My hope was that the clouds of an incoming weather front my just be making their appearance over the mountains, but leaving the sky to the east mostly clear or perhaps with some interesting clouds around dawn. We were up well before first light and on the road. As it began to be light we could see that there were a lot of clouds coming in, and when we arrived at our intended shooting location the clouds were closing in quickly. I guessed that there might, just maybe, be a brief window of light as the sun rose above mountains on the far side of the valley and, for an instant, might shine light horizontally above the mountains and below the clouds. It didn’t quite happen. (And you can’t always count on the good light. You have to be out there in some light failures if you hope to be there enough to get the miraculous successes, too.) The best we got was a brief and fiery illumination of the undersides of these clouds, above darker lower clouds and the shadowed peaks of the Amargosa Range.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: Death Valley

Trail Canyon, Dust Storm Haze

Flow Lines, Morning Light

Telescope Peak

Desert Dawn, Storm Clouds

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.