Tag Archives: barren

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

Trail Canyon

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Trail Canyon - Morning light angles across eroded ridges and gullies on lower slopes of the Panamint Range above Trail Canyon, Death Valley National Park.
Morning light angles across eroded ridges and gullies on lower slopes of the Panamint Range above Trail Canyon, Death Valley National Park.

Trail Canyon. Death Valley National Park. January 5, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning light angles across eroded ridges and gullies on lower slopes of the Panamint Range above Trail Canyon, Death Valley National Park.

This is another photograph that I’ve been thinking about for a while, and one that I was virtually certain would be in black and white when I shot it. I’ve looked down into Trail Canyon quite a few times and tried to “see” a photograph that would somehow consist entirely of the overlapping ridges and layers of stratified rock, tilted at crazy and seemingly opposing angles. My previous photographs of this location had been made late in the day – when the light is beautiful in many directions from this overlook, but when the canyon itself is often shrouded in early shade.

I made this photograph in the morning. It was my first time at this location high in the Panamints at dawn instead of at sunset. I arrived on a cold winter morning before dawn to find no other people there and no wind. (The latter is a bit unusual here, but was certainly welcome, seeing that I would be shooting with long focal length lenses.) The first subject to shoot was the pre-dawn light on clouds high above the landscape. Then my attention moved to the first light striking various higher points within my range of view, and then followed the light as it worked its way down to lower elevations. After that I turned my attention more to guts of this canyon, but was not getting quite what I wanted at first – until the sun rose high enough to peak over ridges and begin to highlight the inner folds of the canyon as seen in this photograph. I made several different compositions, but in the end decided on this one that eliminates any extraneous elements outside of the canyon itself.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Dry Wash, Twenty Mule Team Canyon

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Dry Wash, Twenty Mule Team Canyon
Dry Wash, Twenty Mule Team Canyon

Dry Wash, Twenty Mule Team Canyon. Death Valley National Park, California. April 2. 2009. © Copyright 2009 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A dry wash descends past the barren hills of Twenty Mule Team Canyon in morning shadows, Death Valley National Park.

I made this photograph on an early morning in early April a couple of years ago. I had gone to Death Valley National Park’s Twenty Mule Team Canyon to photograph some folded and eroded patterns in the upper portion of this valley, and a bit after sunrise I noticed a trail heading up a side canyon. I decided to follow it. It started out by ascending the wash shown in the photograph and eventually reached a low saddle along the eroded ridge of between this canyon and the descent to Death Valley itself. When I arrived there, as sometimes happens in Death Valley, I discovered an old vehicle track heading down into the canyon on the other side.

Since I had some other plans for a bit later in the morning, and because I didn’t see anything immediately exciting on the other side of this ridge as the route descended, I instead backtracked into this wash. As my trail crossed the broad area across from this line of hills I looked back toward the main valley and saw this sunlit s-curve in front of the somewhat shaded ridge.

Related: See my extensive posts on Photographing Death Valley

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Abandoned Mining Cabin Ruins, Panamint Range

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Abandoned Mining Cabin Ruins, Panamint Range
Abandoned Mining Cabin Ruins, Panamint Range

Abandoned Mining Cabin Ruins, Panamint Range. Death Valley National Park, California. March 29, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Black and white photograph of the ruins of an abandoned mining cabin high in the Panamint Mountain Range of Death Valley National Park.

There are a number of things that make Death Valley National Park, to the best of my knowledge, rather unique. One is the extensive history of human habitation inside the park boundaries, quite a bit of which is visible –  though some takes a bit more effort and attention to spot. The history of mining in the park is well-known, and many of the icons of the park have connections to this history. If you visit Furnace Creek, for example, you cannot miss the displays of old wagons and so forth used to move ore out of the Valley. It doesn’t take a lot of careful study to figure out that many park roads originated in an era of prospecting and mining. There are several well-known examples of structures left over from that era in and around the park, too.

It is largely because of this history that many areas of this national park are (or have been – some are now reverting to wilderness status) accessible by gravel road or four-wheel-drive routes. I would argue that you can’t really get to know this park if you just stick to the paved roads and the points of interest that they access. If you drive any of these other routes and keep your eyes open you will often be surprised by the left overs from relatively recent mining and prospecting, much of which isn’t really written about or described in the usual guides to the park. (And I’m not going to offer specific details about where to find such places here, since I don’t want to be even a little bit responsible for damage to them. If you do visit, treat them with care and respect.)

As I drove along a gravel road in one of the many mountain ranges of the park, returning from a site that is somewhat well-known, I began to notice evidence of fairly recent mining and prospecting. Faint tracks depart from the main “road” and cross valleys and hills, here and there tailing piles and mine entrances are visible, and sometimes you come across old structures such as cabins, storage bunkers, or wooden towers above mine entrances. I spotted the ruins of this old cabin above the road at one point and decided to walk up and investigate.

I’m almost always surprised at how “modern” many of the traces found at these places seem to be. I guess I am expecting something from the 1800s, but quite a few of these places look like they were build and occupied much later than that. I find modern things like linoleum flooring or modern-looking nails or electrical wire in many of them. There obviously isn’t much left of this cabin now, but from the detritus lying around near it and the form and materials found here, it must have been a reasonably comfortable place to live. As I walk around such places I often try to imagine what it must have been like to wake up every morning in this silent desert and head out for another day of physical labor.

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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Dawn Light, Base of the Cottonwood Mountains

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Dawn Light, Base of the Cottonwood Mountains
Dawn Light, Base of the Cottonwood Mountains

Dawn Light, Base of the Cottonwood Mountains. Death Valley National Park, California. March 29, 2011. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Dawn light on the based of the Cottonwood Mountains at the edge of Death Valley.

This is (yet another) one of those photographs that is the result of some odd combination of “planning” and serendipity. When I travel somewhere to do photography I often, though not always, have some ideas about certain types of subjects I would like to photograph or about ways I’d like to photograph them. On this visit to Death Valley I had a few such ideas in mind – one of them had to do with scenes that filled the frame with the rugged and forbidding and seemingly lifeless mountains and valleys and ridges of the place. Another had to do with photographing in the early light along the west side of the Valley, something I thought about but didn’t really try on my previous visit. This photograph and a few others like grew out of those ideas.

On the other hand, I wouldn’t have been in this spot at this moment if I had not had an electrical problem with my car! The night before I had returned to the campground from a bit of late shooting, parked the car, and went about my “camp business” before crawling into the tent and setting my alarm for an appropriate pre-dawn hour so that I could arrive at a particular location before the sun came up. The alarm went off at the appointed time, and a few minutes later I emerged from my tent and got into my car. It wouldn’t start. I soon realized that the car was electrically “dead” – no interior lights, etc. Since it was still completely dark, the idea of doing auto repair outside the tents and RVs of lots of other sleeping campers was out of the question, so I went back into my tent and speculated uncomfortably about the potential costs of towing and automobile repair in Death Valley.

Later, as the sky began to lighten, I heard other campers stirring. I got up – again – and opened the engine compartment to find that one of the battery cables had come off, perhaps as I drove a rather rough road the previous day! Relieved to find that this was something that I could fix, I reattached the cable, quickly got in the car, and figured I would see what I could salvage of the morning shoot. I headed west across the Valley toward Towne Pass, thinking about photographing some snow that was high on the ridge. As I drove I saw that the first light had still not quite reached the Valley floor along the base of the Cottonwood Range. I quickly found a slight rise along the road where the view wasn’t obstructed by desert plants, pulled over, put on the long lens, and made a few photographs as this beautiful light worked its way down the face of the range and began to work its way out across the giant wash along the edge of the Valley.

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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.