Desert Parks of the Southwest - A Hackberry Farm Nature Photography Workshops field report

Standing at the edge of the Rio Grande River, the coming sunrise is already beginning to light up the immense escarpment before us.  The river babbles past and can't be more than a foot deep.  While our feet are just on the edge of the water and firmly planted in Texas, Mexico is only about fifteen feet away - literally a stone's throw.  

As the sun rises, the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon illuminates.  Through the escarpment, eons of water erosion carved a giant slit down through the rock, and here, the Rio Grande snakes through.

The river is legendary:  it's a boundary between two cultures, an ecologically rich zone where everything from mountain lions to wild horses roam, and it's a political flashpoint where decades of malaise on the part of our political class have needlessly made the borderlands a dividing wedge issue for Americans.

On this quiet December morning in the Desert Parks of the Southwest nature photography workshop, it's just a nondescript river that provides a beautiful point to the canyon counterpoint anchored in the composition.  The river offers a softness to the hardscrabble rock that dominates Big Bend National Park. 

This stop is a good beginning for our nature photography workshop.

For the next two days, we explore this immense national park in search of an image that epitomizes the Chihuahuan Desert and everything it offers therein.  It's no easy feat because there is beauty everywhere.  Prickly pear cactus, lechuguilla, ocotillo, and other desert plants smatter the landscape and provide a valuable foreground element to the immense mountainous landscape, whose peaks were formed by ancient magmatic activity.  

But in such a serene place, we settle in and photograph the desert.  All her beauty and blemishes meld into one inside a camera.

Time is short here, however, as this workshop is a road trip of sorts. From here, we'll venture to three other national parks in search of those images, which, when looked at in totality, will tell the story of such a unique place in America.

After time spent in Big Bend National Park, we make our way north.  Along our route, we'll stop at places of interest like Marfa, Valentine, or the roadside artwork in between.  These stops help break up the monotony of the road, but before long, we see a giant monolith rising from the desert floor.  

It's Guadalupe Mountain.

This mountain is unusual.  Instead of rising in a triangular shape from the surrounding plains, it juts out from an escarpment that runs north into New Mexico.  At the end, where it terminates in Texas, a bump rises from the top.  That's the summit, and it's called Guadalupe Peak.  This marks the highest elevation in the entire state at roughly 8,750 feet.  

I've been to the summit on three occasions. Still, my fourth will have to wait; for today, we're headed to the mountain's west side to photograph an immense dune field that will light up nicely (along with the mountain) when the sun begins to set.

From an aerial map, you can see the dunes.  They lie at the north end of a complex of salt pans.  One hundred and fifty years ago, local skirmishes flared up - a conflict over who had the right to mine the salt held in the pans and left over from an ancient sea that once covered these plains.  As the sea receded, the water evaporated, and the salt (held in situ) stayed behind.  As the prevailing southwest winds wailed over the eons, the crystalline particles piled up on the northeast side of the complex and created undulating dunes whose complexity and beauty belie the mind's eye in what you may expect to find in the vast creosote bush flats that sprawl in every direction.

Rising above the desert scrub, we look at the side of the big mountain.  Like the dunes, the mountain is a remnant of a sea that's relegated to antiquity.  It's a vast fossilized reef that's made up of crustaceous creatures that once lived on the sea floor.  From our vantage point and to the right, the prominence called El Capitan juts out at the end.  It's a sentinel that overlooks all of Texas and is an enduring landmark that has guided historic and contemporary explorers alike.

It pairs well with the dunes we now stand in.

We'll come back to this park and photograph the mountains again, but in the meantime, we'll take the extremes of this excursion.  While Guadalupe Peak rises to the highest peak in the Lone Star State, just a few miles down the road, we descend into the winding trail that leads to Carlsbad Caverns.  Entering through a rounded gap in the side of a limestone cliff, we wind around down the path and immediately start seeing strangely configured shapes emerging from the ground and hanging from the ceiling.   As we enter the dark zone - the area of the cavern where no outside light can penetrate - the shapes become even more exotic.

Stalactites, stalagmites, flowstone, and other terrestrial oddities cling from the cavern's ceiling or grow from the floor.  Each formed by a unrelenting drip, drip, drip of mineralized water.  The water comes from the scant rain that falls on the surface.  Permeating through the karst limestone through which it flows, each drop erodes particles from the stone.  As each drop passes through, its microscopic minerals are deposited on features below. It's a subterranean process millions of years in the making.

After we move on from the caverns and the mountains, we settle into the Tularosa Basin.  This basin is one of the largest in the country, and like the one around the Guadalupe Mountains, it once held an ancient seabed.  At its south end, white gypsum dunes rise from the basin's belly.  The site of them belies the senses.  The sand looks like snow and is cool to the touch.  When I drive into the dunes, I instinctively slow down, thinking the roads are slick.  

Walking into the dunes, it's easy to see how someone can get lost.  As far as you can see, the sandy hills stretch to the horizon.  On the west, the San Andres mountains rise.  To the east, the Sacramentos dominate.  It's a mysterious region that's witnessed cowboy wars, reported UFO crashes, and the site of the first nuclear bomb detonation in human history.

Throughout this excursion, we've soaked up the local culture and history in meaningful ways.  Now, in our last morning in the dunes of White Sands, I stand near another guest as I wait for the sun to rise.  At first, the dunes glow a blue cast, and the sky to the west turns a pale orange.  To the east, the clouds begin to show a hint of pink.  You don't get clouds every day in the desert, so seeing them is a treat.  They are a nice punctuation for an already fantastic scene.

As the sun peaks over the mountains, the east-facing dunes are bathed in light.  Still on the dune's western side, the shade cheats the sandy hills, and its denizens from light - at least for now.  Peppered throughout the scene are randomly growing yucca and saltbush.  They provide nice elements in the composition.

Momentarily, I look up at my guest standing near me.  Out here, in the quiet of the desert and the quiet of the morning, all is right.  He must have felt my glance because, as if on cue, he looked back.  In an instant, he smiles, nods, and goes back to taking pictures.

That one gesture summed up our whole experience. Well said…