You Want A Shoggoth With That?: More On Death Valley

(click for larger image)

So my mom and I headed down to Death Valley a week ago Sunday. Through a lucky coincidence, the rental place at the airport had a Land Rover LR3 available for a reasonable price, so I jumped on that. Had fun seeing what the nav system thought we should take for a route. Made it down in a reasonable time, although it was pretty tiring (7-8 hours). We stayed at the Furnace Creek Ranch and I did some long exposures in their date palm grove, despite being thoroughly exhausted. It was very pleasant there, in the 50s I'd say (at night).

Got up early the next morning to go to Zabriskie Point (see previous blog entry for a shot of the moonset there with Manly Beacon in the shot). Then we drove down to Badwater, which is the lowest spot in the western hemisphere. It's pretty funny to see "SEA LEVEL" painted hundreds of feet up on the cliff wall near Badwater. Drove a ways down 190 and shot some pretty yellow flowers that were covering the hillside. After heading back to ranch for a quick lunch and offloading pictures, we headed out to try and get to the Racetrack for sunset. Unfortunately, due to pilot error, I took a wrong turn and drove over an hour down the wrong road. Did make it as far as Ubehebe Crater by sunset, but it was too late to get to the Racetrack which is down 27 miles of nasty washerboard road (hence the 4WD vehicle).

The last morning we got up at O' Dark Early to take pictures at the dunes at Stovepipe Wells. That was super cool, although there were some people climbing on the dune I wanted to shoot, which kind of bummed me out. It was really quiet there, except for the occasional car jetting down nearby highway 190. I just stood and listened to the silence (well, except for the unfortunate background noise in my ears :-p) for a few minutes until I heard a bird singing. It was a really tranquil moment. We had been there three hours before we knew it. Drove back to the hotel, bugged out and headed back home. Stopped for a short side trip at Darwin Falls (a smallish waterfall that runs year round) where we hiked into a canyon for a few hours. On the way back saw the wind kicking up a huge cloud of sand and borate, which was pretty cool, as was the site of joshua trees in the sunset. Overall, an excellent trip. I'd like to go again some time (not during the summer).

Still haven't processed many pix. In the meantime, here are some teasers. Click to see larger versions.