A red rock gully among the desert hills of the Panamint Range, Death Valley National Park.
This is anything but an iconic image, but I think that it is emblematic of a certain type of scene that is often seen in Death Valley National Park once you get out of the main Valley and up into the hills, especially during the brief spring season when the light can be a bit softer and the plants a bit (relatively speaking!) greener.
The photograph looks up a broad valley that is visible from along the road that rises from the main road through the Valley and climbs toward the Wildrose Canyon area. Here the elevation is high enough that the dry, sun-baked flat land of the Valley is nowhere to be found. Instead this is a country of large valleys and plateaus, cut in places (mostly at the bottom of canyons) but rocky outcroppings and gullies. This red rock gully is easily visible from the road, though the odds are that most people just drive right by. I had seen it on several drives past this spot before I thought to stop and photograph it, and I was fortunate to be there when the light seemed just right.
A lone branch lies across dried mud on the playa of Panamint Valley, Death Valley National Park.
First, a story about the location. My first visit to Death Valley was sometime in the late 1990s, when the “hiking and biking” club at my kids’ middle and high school did a trip there. The club is a long and interesting story that I don’t have time or space to describe here fully. Suffice it to say that the teacher, “Mr. Hodges,” had for decades taken kids on amazing outdoor adventures throughout the western United States every year, and that the trip that year was to involve visits to several places in the park and then a backpacking trip down to the Valley from up in the Teakettle Junction vicinity. This may sound like a crazy thing to do with a bunch of school kids, but the group had a record of success. I was along as a parent chaperone since my oldest son was a participant in the trip.
The “readers digest” version of the story of the trip is that, as is often the case near the beginning of April, we encountered an astonishing range of weather conditions. Early on it snowed and the wind blew at gale force levels. This forced us to abandon our initial backpacking plans after we had already camped overnight near Teakettle Junction, and to head back down to the Valley. We readjusted our plans and decided that we might still be able to do an overnight hike down the length of the upper Valley and (leaving out a bunch of intervening adventures in this narrative) we arrived at Stovepipe Wells and set up camp… just in time for a tremendous dust storm to blow in. The next morning the “bus” arrived that was to take the kids and a few of the chaperones home (the rest of us were in a truck carrying tons – literally – of gear on the roof rack and in a trailer) and we headed up to cross Towne Pass. It turned out that the “bus” (which was more or less a large airport shuttle-type van) was ill-equipped for these conditions and after struggling up the pass and then racing down the other side, the transmission blew out at the bottom of the descent into Panamint Valley. Those of us in the truck pulling the trailer arrived a few minutes later to find a group of scared kids and parents who had just experienced more excitement than they wanted.
I have a strong visual memory of “Mary,” one of the parents, who had just had a bit too much excitement walking quietly north away from the road and across this playa. Ever since that time, this place that most people would probably blow right past, has almost always warranted a stop as I passed by on my way out of the Valley. This trip was no exception. I left my camera gear in the car and just walked a ways out onto the playa. As I walked, even though I had been certain that my photography for this trip was finished, I started noticing some of the small details on the playa… and I went back to my car to get my camera, then returned and made a few hand-held exposures of some of these small subjects.
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.
Early season morning light on Ellery Lake near Tioga Pass.
I made this photograph on the same early-season morning on which I made the vertical format photograph of the same scene that I recently posted. Ellery Lake is alongside highway 120, the “Tioga Pass Road,” just beyond the eastern boundary of the park and the Sierra crest. To be completely forthcoming, I made this photograph from the side of the road! (The many individuals who know this area well, and who have probably stopped to look at the same scene, already knew that…)
To briefly recap, the road here curves around the upper end of the lake above this small bay. Looking across the bay, the rocky edges of the lake are visible along with the steep talus slopes ascending to the peaks around Mt. Dana beyond. The spot has a natural beauty in terms of the forms of the landscape, but I think it is difficult to photograph as a whole – the light is the tricky thing. The earliest morning light is block by high peaks to the east and the late afternoon light goes quickly from sun to shade as the sun drops below ridges behind the camera position, and this light can be fairly flat since it comes from directly behind. This photograph was made in the morning, but not close to sunrise at all – it was two or three hours later. Even here the scene isn’t without technical challenges, especially from the dynamic range that spans from the shadows behind backlit rocks and trees to the very bright snow fields at upper right.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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