Golden Desert-Snapdragon plant emerges from rocky terrain, Death Valley National Park
This is another photograph from a Death Valley trip I made back in 2010, “rediscovered” while going through old raw files near the end of 2012. The photograph was made along the roadside near a popular, even iconic, Death Valley location early one morning, during a spring that followed a much wetter than usual winter. During my visit I managed to catch the beginning of the impressive blooming of wildflowers that almost invariably follows such weather, as the desert plants take full advantage of the moisture and do everything in their power to reproduce. During the course of my visit, which lasted less than a week, I watch bare hillsides transition into flower-covered hillsides, and it seemed that some new plant was growing in almost every place that a plant might grow.
This plant is, obviously, quite small. You might have overlooked it and some of the nearby plants if you did not slow down and look a bit more closely. I only noticed the new plants after stopping on the other side of the road and looking around a bit. Once I did so, I saw a lot of wildflower color in this otherwise barren and rock place. This is on the verge of being a “belly flower” – one so small and so close to the ground that you must get down on your belly to photograph it!
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. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
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.
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. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
“One Green Leaf” — One green leaf on a bed of brown and tan autumn leaves in a desert wash, Capitol Reef National Park
My two October trips to photograph in Utah extended my ongoing education about the place, and one of the locations about which I had and still have the most to learn is Capitol Reef National Park. My encounter with this park, in 2012, was a bit superficial, though my excuse is that we were only passing through on our way to another place. All I saw was the short highway drive that passed through the park via the Fruita District — the rest of the park remained a complete mystery. In October I was there twice. On the first visit I was in the area enough to start to get a bit of a feel for the place, though I mostly still stuck to popular and accessible areas, with the addition of a bit of hiking and a long drive on gravel roads down the less-visited side of the park. On the second visit I learned and saw a bit more – enough to convince me that there is much more to this park and that I want to return.
I made this photograph in a short slot canyon in an out-of-the way area of the park. We drove there on a very cold morning and headed into the canyon while the temperature still hovered around freezing. There was no one else there, and we barely even saw anyone else on the long drive to get there. The little canyon itself was quite beautiful and full of interesting surprises – juxtapositions of glowing red-orange walls and shaded blue-purple walls, brilliantly colorful gambel oak leaves, large sandstone faces and walls, and more. As I investigate a place like this I try to let my eyes roam beyond the first things I see, and try to also see smaller things that could easily be missed. Here I happened to look down at my feet – sometimes a good thing to do! – and see that the floor of the stream bed carpeted with oak and other leaves that had recently fallen, and this batch of brown and tan leaves held one that was still green.
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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.
A dried plant and sandstone patterns in a southwest desert canyon, Utah
I was in Utah twice this fall, most recently with my friends Charlie and Karl to photograph a range of desert canyons and similar terrain. I’ve written before that I’m very new to photographing Utah, having seriously shot there for the first time only this past spring. But I’m trying to make up for lost time! Overall, I have spent something like a total of more than five weeks there this year! Yes, I like shooting in Utah. :-)
On the previous visits, I went to quite a few of the well-known locations – largely the national parks – and began the process of getting to know and understand that place a bit. On the most recent visit I was fortunate to be traveling with people who have shot there for decades, and I benefited from their long experience. Getting a bit more off the beaten track, we barely touched national parks – passing through Zion and visiting some remote areas of Capitol Reef. Instead we poked into a range of little canyons and valleys and so forth that don’t have the prominence of the parks. The specific locations are perhaps not that important since the state seems to be filled with similar places. This was my first real experience with the intimate desert canyons and river/creek courses that carve deeply into the landscape, where midday light bounces and reflects into the deep landscape in ways that are utterly unlike the California locations where I most often photograph.
This photograph was made in such a place, the first narrow canyon that we visited. Parking in an inauspicious spot along a gravel desert road, we dropped into a wash and wandered upstream, soon entering a narrow canyon as the sandstone walls rose beside us. Before long the canyon was narrow enough that we had to continually cross back and forth across the creek or simply wade straight up its course. As the canyon narrowed, direct sunlight no longer made it down to the creek – instead the light reflected from the higher cliff faces and bounced down into the canyon, toning the light red from the sandstone surface. In this photograph the cliff and two large pieces of sandstone contain angled strata and reflect the light in various ways as a small and seemingly dead plant sits in a crack in the rock.
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
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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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.
