Death Valley Days & Nights - A Hackberry Farm nature photography workshop field report

The air is getting noticeably cooler as the sun sinks closer to the Panamint Mountains behind us.  Here in the Mesquite Dunes of Death Valley National Park, the experience is surreal.  All is quiet, save for the occasional breeze through the creosote bushes below.  Each person on this nature photography workshop concentrates on their composition that, in their own estimation, will encapsulate what it’s like to be in this spot of the vast Mojave Desert.

Across the vast tan-hued dunes, wind-carved lines undulate.  The side lighting accentuates the patterns of light and dark across the sides of each hill.  Looking out across the dunes towards the Grapevine Mountains, the same light patterns play over the countless dunes that stretch to the basin’s edges.

“It’s so peaceful out here,” says one of the guests.  I concur.  Last year, when I came to this arid land, it took up my efforts just to learn the vastness of the park and where to go.  This year, that all changed.  I connected.

Nearly twenty-four hours ago, we were driving back to our oasis lodging in Furnace Creek.  We’d been out all afternoon exploring ghost towns, pioneer towns, watching wild burros pick their way through the desert scrub, and seeing countless stars dot the black sky as the day cleaved into the night.

As we cruised through the dark, a quietness fell over the van.  Everyone is tired, but no one is sleeping.  They simply listen to the hum of the tire on the road and watch the desert slip past us in the moonlit night.  It was at that moment that everything clicked.

“This place is special,” I concede to myself in the silence of my own thoughts.

The land here is rough and rugged with an austere beauty that deserts only impart.  It’s an armchair geologist’s dream.  The landscape alternates between high mountain escarpments and flat, low basins whose bottom lies well below sea level.  It sounds trite, but I have no better way of putting it: Death Valley is a land of extremes.

Over time, the once flat land buckled and folded due to extreme tectonic forces in the earth’s bowels.  Evidence of this plate movement is everywhere.  The most extreme example is the tall escarpments that rise around the margins of the flat basins.

Broad eroded alluvial fans, stippled with subtle shades of browns and tans, delight the creative eye.  Unlike many big, in-your-face lush mountain scenes that offer only a single view, the deserts here offer beautiful views and, hence, photographs, in all directions.  Portrait, landscape, panoramic, black-and-white, macro, and infrared are all options for compelling compositions at just about every stop we visit.

This year, we hit the jackpot from a historical perspective.  Being the hottest place on the planet and the driest place in the United States, water here is scarce most years.  However, due to abundant rainfall, the ancient Lake Manly is once again holding water.  In the Pleistocene, the lake covering Badwater Basin was over 1,000 feet deep.  Climate change evaporated all of the water, and over time, all that’s left is a broad salt flat whose mineral deposits are thousands of feet deep in places.  Most of Badwater Basin lies below sea level, and the high mountains flanking it create a heat sink that prevents cool air from penetrating.  In 1913, the Furnace Creek weather station recorded a world record temperature of 134-degrees Fahrenheit.

While the basin is still short on moisture, this year, a broad sheet of water covers hundreds of acres.  Lake Manly lives again.  The site is rare and unusual, and we take the opportunity to photograph the mountains reflected in the water.

The rains also sparked the first superbloom in a decade.  Desert Gold and Phacila rise from the hardscrabble and blanket a landscape that is otherwise dry and bare.  The colors are beautiful, and we spend ample time documenting the historic event.

Bouncing around the desert, we see the sublime and witness the unusual.  After all, we are mere spittin’ distance from Area 51 and the Yucca Flat nuclear test range.  We witness an unusual light cruising through the morning sky, see atypical helicopters flying past with enormous, unknown equipment dangling beneath, see two ostriches running through the desert, and military planes screaming overhead from time to time.  It’s a collection of the strange.

Perhaps the strangest thing we witnessed was the moving rocks of the Racetrack Playa.  Even though scientists think they know why the rocks move, no one has ever witnessed the phenomenon.

Questions about the rocks still abound:

How did the rocks get to the middle of the playa?

If the rocks came from the surrounding mountains, why are there so few?

If this phenomenon’s been going on as long as anyone knows, why aren’t there more rocks?

And so on…

We stand on the playa’s north end and stare at the first sailing rock we find.  Surrounding the rocks are perfectly hexagonal shapes in the fine-silted soil that’s dried to a hardness that’s substantial enough to support our weight without indentation.  Estimates suggest there are nearly 10 billion of these shapes in the 1,700 acre playa.  The ground here is so flat, it only drops two inches over a distance of 2.8 miles.

In the area in which we explore, a spot that’s probably 100 acres in size, we find a half dozen or so sailing rocks.  Each one left behind unusual and seemingly random tracks that don’t seem to correlate with other nearby rocks.  We stand around and discuss the mystery of it all.

We leave with more questions than answers.

That is the allure of the desert:  The mystery of it all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEJFFvTOR24

ADDITIONAL IMAGES