Trees ascend sage-covered hills toward the Sierra Nevada crest near June Lake, California.
Near highway 395 in Mono County, the main north-south route east of the Sierra crest, these open stands of large conifers ascend from the high desert sagebrush country towards the peaks of the Sierra crest, which rise much more abruptly on this side of the range than on the gentle west side. The tall ridge is above the June Lakes resort area between Mammoth Lakes and Lee Vining.
While my primary goal on this trip was to photograph in the Yosemite high country along Tioga Pass Road, smoke from a wildfire near Glacier Point in the park was drifting over the Tuolumne area and creating a lot of very non-photogenic haze. I had a hunch that by dropped over to the east side of the range I might be able to get away from the smoke or at least find areas where it wasn’t so thick. The smoke was still affecting the light near Lee Vining, but I didn’t have to drive too far south to get out of its path, though even here there is a bit of haze increasing the effect of atmospheric recession.
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.
Cracked and dry surface of the playa in Panament Valley, Death Valley National Park.
This micro-scene could be found in many locations in Death Valley and, for that matter, in many places in the USA and around the rest of the planet. But my little rectangle of the patterns of drying and cracked mud comes from the surface of the Playa (sometimes called “Panamint Lake?”) in upper Panamint Valley in Death Valley National Park. I wrote previously that it was the last day of my late-March photographic visit to Death Valley – I had finished my photography in the main Valley and had started the long drive back to the Bay Area. After crossing Towne Pass the road descends into Panamint Valley to a junction where I most often go south towards Trona and Ridgecrest and beyond.
Just before this junction the road crosses the playa, an extraordinarily flat surface formed when silt washed down from the surrounding mountains occasionally pools and gradually dries, forming what may be the flattest surfaces on the planet. As the moisture evaporates the mud cracks and splits into these interesting semi-geometrical patterns.
For no particular reason other than that this is a spot where I often make one final stop before leaving the park, I pulled over and wandered out onto the playa. I enjoy walking on these often-immense flat surfaces, but there is something very odd about the experience, too. Perhaps it is the slightly odd feeling of walking on such a large floor-flat surface in the natural world, or it might be the deep silence and stillness. In any case, as I wandered around not too far from the road I started looking a bit more closely at the patterns of cracks and soon decided that my photography was not quite finished yet – so I went back to the car to get my camera and made a small series of hand-held photographs with the camera pointing straight down. (The “straight down” shooting raises a question: How should the photograph be oriented? The horizontal orientation shown here is what I saw as I made the photograph… but I also wonder about rotating it 90″ clockwise.)
Early morning light striking minor dunes on Mesquite Flat with Cottonwood Mountains wash and the Last Chance Range in the distance, Death Valley National Park.
These dunes are not too far from the main Mesquite Dunes near Stovepipe Wells – they are a bit further east from the better known tallest section of the dunes. The areas of lower dunes provide some very interesting shapes and textures on a smaller scale in some ways that those of the larger dunes. I photographed these with a long lens, shooting from a rise, at a point in time very shortly after the first morning light had struck the sand. The background hills, part of a very large alluvial fan at the base of the Cottonwood Mountains, were in the shadow of a cloud.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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