Category Archives: Photographs: Desert

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

Evening Dust and Rain

April 5, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

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.

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

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

Sand Dunes, First Light

April 3, 2016 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The first morning light reveals textures in sand dunes, Death Valley National Park

These dunes, and others like them, are both more ephemeral and more permanent that many may expect. The permanence initially surprised me. I had always imagined the peaks of dunes marching gradually across the landscape like slow motion ocean waves, producing a landscape that would never be the same twice. However, observing certain dunes in Death Valley National Park over a period of time made it clear that the broad features of the dunes are actually very nearly permanent. From year to year the overall form of the dunes remains largely the same — no surprise, perhaps, given that the forces that form them are constant, including the prevailing winds and surrounding geological features. Yet, other things are more ephemeral. Plants come and go, and footprints are erased by the next dust storm. The light is constantly changing, through the daily cycles and the annual cycle.

This was the final morning of this trip to Death Valley. Since dust storms (and rain!) had passed through the previous evening I was certain that I could find areas unmarked by footprints, where the natural patterns produced by wind would be found. I drove to a less popular area near the dunes, loaded up my equipment, and set out across the playa to get to the low dunes I had in mind. I arrived in soft pre-dawn light and began to photograph, trying to work with this subtle light and its extraordinarily low contrast, all the while watching the sky to the east to see when sunlight would strike the dunes. I composed this photograph in that soft light, but as I worked the sun cleared the mountains far to the east and warmer colored light began to more clearly show the sand patterns. I made this photograph during the very brief interval — literally only seconds — when that first light began to softly light the sand and before it struck with full intensity.

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

Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: People, Photographs: Photographers

Photographer, Long Valley, Dawn

October 24, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Photographer Patricia Emerson Mitchell working the dawn light near a small lake in Long Valley

On about my third week of aspen photography this fall I was accompanied back to the Sierra by my wife and fellow photographer, Patricia Emerson Mitchell. There are all sorts of advantages for me when she comes along — motel (instead of tent or back of car), real food (instead of things heated over a camp stove), and more… ;-) By this point in the aspen season I was ready for something that wasn’t aspen, so on this morning we headed east rather than west into the Sierra, traveling out across Long Valley with a plan of going even further east toward the White Mountains near the town of Benton.

We started in near darkness and arrived at a familiar spot out in the Valley before the sun rose. We parked and headed out to our destination, arriving a few minutes before the light, at which point we went to work rapidly — the photographic opportunities evolve rapidly as the first light arrives. Here she sets up close to the shoreline of the lack, photographing across the water toward mountains to our north as the first light rakes across sagebrush and the nearby hills.

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

Dust Storm, Desert Mountains

June 7, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dust from a desert sand storm fills the air and obscures mountains

You’ll have to look closely to make sense of this one. Made on April 1st, there is a certain sense about this photograph of a minor April Fools joke played at my expense. I had experienced several days of very dusty conditions in Death Valley. On the first day I was way up in the Panamint Mountains at dawn, only to discover that I was still within a cloud of dusty air the extended up to well above 8000′ of elevation. I never did figure out where it was coming from, as the Valley itself certainly wasn’t producing it. That night the winds came to the Valley and blew a decent sand storm through my camp. The next day I figured that I would try to find a way to evade the blowing dust.

I got up very early — as always — and headed out of Death Valley and to the east toward Nevada. I then took a long back road route back into the park. This route took me on back-country gravel roads through the Amargosa Range, eventually dropping down into a deep canyon before heading back to Death Valley. Driving in these mountains and down this canyon, I forgot about the dusty conditions — here there wasn’t more than a bit of hazy atmosphere and the wind didn’t work its way into this canyon either. At the bottom of the canyon the route finally emerged from a narrow canyon and arrived at the top of a huge gravel fan stretching down toward the Valley. And here I saw the extent of the dust and wind, as the entire Valley was full of dust that was well-distributed yet thick enough to almost completely obscure the mountain range on the other side. My day of clear weather came to an abrupt end as I descended into the dust and wind and headed back to my camp.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: Desert

Evening Dust and Rain

Sand Dunes, First Light

Photographer, Long Valley, Dawn

Dust Storm, Desert Mountains

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