Tag Archives: death valley

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

Sand Dunes, First Light

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Sand Dunes, First Light
The first morning light reveals textures in sand dunes, Death Valley National Park

Sand Dunes, First Light. Death Valley National Park, California. March 31, 2016. © Copyright 2016 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

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.

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 and Amazon.
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Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature

Dust Storm, Desert Mountains

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Dust Storm, Desert Mountains
Dust from a desert sand storm fills the air and obscures mountains

Dust Storm, Desert Mountains. Death Valley National Park, California. April 1, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

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 is a California photographer and visual opportunist. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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

Commentary, Photograph Exposed, Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Southern California

A Photograph Exposed: “Two Rocks, Morning, Racetrack Playa”

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(“A Photograph Exposed” is a series exploring some of my photographs in greater detail.)

Two Rocks, Morning, Racetrack Playa - Black and white photograph of two "moving rocks" on the Racetrack Playa at Death Valley National Park. Morning light with unusual clouds, and the Grandstand in the distance.
Black and white photograph of two “moving rocks” on the Racetrack Playa at Death Valley National Park. Morning light with unusual clouds, and the Grandstand in the distance.

Two Rocks, Morning, Racetrack Playa. Death Valley National Park, California. April 3, 2006. © Copyright 2006. G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Moving rocks, lenticular clouds — morning on the Racetrack Playa.

This photograph from Death Valley’s Racetrack Playa is one of the first I made when I began photographing this landscape seriously, and it remains one of my favorites from the park — yet it also carries a flaw that I’ll describe below.

My first visit to Death Valley National Park had been about seven years earlier at the very end of the previous millennium, when I was one of several adults accompanying a group of middle school and high school students on a visit that was to include a short backpack trip in the Cottonwood Canyon area. The story of that trip deserves its own article, one that would include snow, near-hypothermia, winds that blew down tents, a retreat from the pack trip, an attempt to hike down the upper portion of Death Valley, water shortages, a dust storm, a dangerous situation with a bus, and more.

I’ll never forget my first view of Death Valley on that first visit. We arrived in the park after dark, stopping between Towne Pass and Stovepipe Wells at a small campground a few thousand feet above the valley floor, where we set up in the darkness and went to sleep. Having never seen the Valley before, the next morning I unzipped my tent and stepped outside to see the stupendous “oh wow!” landscape of Death Valley and the mountains on the far side in the beautiful morning light. I was hooked, and I’ve been going back annually since then. Continue reading A Photograph Exposed: “Two Rocks, Morning, Racetrack Playa” →

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

Death Valley, Evening

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Death Valley, Evening
Evening light on the playa of Death Valley, with lower slopes of the Panamint Mountains rising beyond

Death Valley, Evening. Death Valley National Park, California. March 30, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Evening light on the playa of Death Valley, with lower slopes of the Panamint Mountains rising beyond

Since I’ve been traveling to and around Death Valley National Park for more than 15 years now, I’ve seen a lot of the park — but I most certainly have not see all of it, nor have I completely learned how to see everything in it. This is a huge place, varying greatly by location, terrain, season, weather and more. Frankly, the experience of coming to know such a place over time is one of the things I value most about such locations. While I love to “discover” a place that is completely new to me (and Death Valley was that place in the late 1990s for me), the longer process of learning the place and its rhythms more deeply is also, I think, more rewarding. It is wonderful to see a desert gully in evening light for the first time, but it may be even more beautiful to come back to it and recognize an old and familiar friend.

Along these lines, a few years ago, as I continued to push out my own boundaries of experience and knowledge in Death Valley, I began to think more about how to make photographs of things that I might have not thought worthy of a photograph before. I realized that many of these things that don’t scream “photograph me!” are otherwise a core part of the experience of this place: a vast and quiet “empty” landscape, midday sun, haze obscuring great distances, the edge between the last vegetation and a barren playa, a beam of light slanting across an alluvial fan. And if they are central to the sense of the place, it seems that there must be a way to photograph them. And that is a new challenge for me in my Death Valley photography.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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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