Category Archives: Photographs: Death Valley

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

Dried Branch, Sand

April 10, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

The dry remnants of a dead plant in recently wind-blown sand dune, Death Valley National Park

I have been visiting Death Valley regularly for perhaps fifteen years, typically photographing there for nearly a week every year for the past decade, and occasionally more. On my most recent trip, from which I returned only days ago, I was thinking about a number of thing regarding my experience with the place and how it has changed. On my first visits there was, of course, the excitement and wonder of discovering a place that was essentially completely new to me. I recall that on my first trip there I got close to the Race Track without going all the way to this location. We camped not far from that playa and I imagined this place that I had heard so much about and even envisioned it in a particular location – and when I did visit a year or two later I discovered that it was quite a bit different from what I imagined, though magical in different and perhaps more powerful ways. After a few years of visiting and photographing the best known iconic sites I began to find them less interesting, and though I continued to photograph them when the opportunity arose, I focused more on expanding the areas I knew about and on looking more closely at areas I thought I knew.

As I did this, I have to confess that portions of the Death Valley experience baffled me or even put me off a bit. While I found some of the terrain to be tremendously beautiful, there were other aspects that I just couldn’t quite relate to. As a person who has spent a lot of time in forested places with flowing water – mainly the Sierra Nevada – I found some areas of this desert to be, quite honestly, boring. I drove through or past them on my way to what I thought of as the more interesting places where I could find colors outside of the range from tan to gray and where some special object or formation might create an obvious center of interest. However, from time to time I would be surprised to find in some plain, nondescript, and even boring place an experience of stillness, immense space, and deep silence that I had rarely encountered elsewhere. More and more, I began to see this as a primary attraction of this landscape – more so in many cases that the specific features of this pinnacle or that formation or the other valley.

On this recent trip, conditions conspired to make me look more closely at some of these things that I had originally overlooked. The conditions were such that if I had experienced them a few years ago I might have simply left. (In fact, that thought did cross my mind once or twice on this trip.) The spectacular light really never came, skies were cloudy, the air was hazy, it was very hot, the winds blew strongly, and there was a dust storm. During the first couple of day, with the exception of shooting the dust storm, many of the subjects I had in mind simply didn’t work out the way I planned. A bit surprisingly, without the possibility of shooting yet another beautiful golden hour sunset image of a spectacular bit of geography (though I did do some of that still) I slowed down and looked more closely at some of those “boring” places that I had passed through more quickly in the past.

This photograph was made in one of those locations. It was not far from one of those iconic locations, but it wasn’t the iconic spot at all. An hour or so before sunset I simply wandered away from the road, past vegetation and into the sand, and started looking around. In the low spots between dunes, the world beyond was out of sight and the wind was blocked, and as the light faded I encountered again that deep and powerful and timeless silence that is so hard to find almost anywhere else.

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

Desert Plants, Black Hill

April 8, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light on desert arrow weed plants at the base of a black hill, with Death Valley Buttes receding into the hazy distance

This was very nearly the last photograph I made on my recent early April visit to Death Valley National Park. I try to go there to photograph at least once each year, and I’ve probably visited during the first week of April more often than at any other time. This tends to be a transitional season in the park, at least in my experience, and the conditions can range from cool to downright hot. On this visit it was, for the season, “downright hot” – temperatures with in at least the mid to high-nineties every day, and rose to just over 100 degrees on one day. This is not unheard of at this time of year, though it is on the high side of normal for the first week in April. This trip was a challenge for other reasons, too. On the second day I encountered a significant sand storm with accompanying winds, and the light was not exactly cooperative. On two mornings and two evenings clouds shut down the golden hour light, and there was quite a bit of general haze.

On this morning I figured I would do an hour or two of shooting before returning to camp to tear everything down and start my drive back home. I started by going up just past the turn off to Wild Rose Canyon, with the plan being to shoot some long distance photographs of sunrise light on some mountains that I have been thinking about shooting. The sunrise itself was more or less a washout – the atmosphere was so murky that I wasn’t even quite sure when the sun cleared the horizon! Eventually I did get some soft directional light from the sun, but I was finished with this subject somewhat quickly. I decided to go with a backup plan to photograph the Mesquite Dunes with a long lens. As I worked this subject I decided to head a bit further east and see if I could get anything from the backlight coming across the low hills above Salt Creek, and as I traveled that direction I passed this small black hill, where I have photographed before, and saw these backlit arrow weed plants and the more distant hills near Death Valley Buttes in the morning haze.

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

Salt Flats and Waterways

March 9, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Seasonal creeks twist though salt flats of Death Valley, Death Valley National Park, California

Since I have recently posted a few other photograph from this same location and with some of the same commentary that I might include here, I’ll try to keep this description a bit short. The photograph was made from the top of Dantes View, the Death Valley observation point that is about a mile above the lowest part of the Valley near Badwater. The panorama from Dantes View almost overwhelmingly expansive, so on this visit I though that rather than just trying to photograph that immensity, I would also use a long focal length lens to try to isolate and pick out some smaller portions of the overall scene.

This photograph shows a section of the salt flats, surrounded by browner areas that include more gravel. A darker foreground area that runs along the road is visible at the bottom of the photograph, and the upper corner includes the area where the West Side Drive runs between the flats and the lower slopes of the Panamint Range. The many waterways crossing the flats and then converging on the salt area are evidence of the role water plays in the creation of this barren terrain.

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

Morning Haze, Death Valley

March 8, 2013 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Distant snow-covered peaks are barely visible across the vast space of Death Valley in hazy morning light

This photograph was made from Dantes View, high in the mountains along the eastern border of Death Valley itself, and with a commanding, panoramic view of a huge portion of the surrounding terrain and especially down into Death Valley and the Badwater area almost right beneath the peak. The view here looks roughly north or northwest, past the location of Furnace Creek and beyond the Mesquite Dunes area to the far northern end of the Valley and then beyond to distant snow-covered peaks.

I have written before that Dantes View has been a difficult place for me to photograph. At first glance, the location has a lot going for it. At about a mile above the Valley floor below, the views encompass a huge area of interesting terrain, ranging from the lowest reaches of Death Valley itself to the 11,000+” Telescope in the Panamint Range to other features so distant that they often fade into the haze. But for me these same features make it very difficult to pick out anything that can draw the larger components of the scene together. There have been times when I have gone there with the intention of photographing, gotten out, looked around, been impressed by the location, and made no photographs at all. This time I mostly shot details of the Valley using a very long lens, but I thought that the shadows of the passing clouds brought enough relieve to the uniformity of the Valley to make this photograph, which I hope conveys some sense of the scale of the place.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: Death Valley

Dried Branch, Sand

Desert Plants, Black Hill

Salt Flats and Waterways

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