Category Archives: Camping

Northwestern Nevada: day two, mostly The Blackrock

There are very few places that go by only part of their name and The. The Blackrock is one of them. I love Death Valley, but it is always Death Valley; The Valley is always Yosemite. Like The Canyon is always the Grand. Maybe – for me – The Escalante for the Grand Staircase National Monument, but there are not many The’s. Even the Bonneville Desert is the Bonneville Saltflats or Desert; The Bonneville always refers to the speed trials.

The Blockrock Playa dominates this part of the world. It is huge and very flat. Big enough and flat enough to drive a car faster than the speed of sound.

Looking down on The Blackrock, it is huge. Being on it, it is almost infinite.  At the south end is the town of Gerlach and when you drive north on the playa – oh! you not only can drive on the playa, there are marked entries and exits – Gerlach disappears by sinking below the horizon. You can actually see the curvature of the earth! Here are a couple of shots but they are weak sauce; it is like trying to understand a Rolling Stone – actually, The Stones – concert by listening to a CD.

 

The last shot by the way was taken about twenty years ago on film and was then scanned. I like to think I am more subtle now. Hummm….maybe not.

One of things that Peter and I talked about – as we drove around was how blogging had changed our photography.  We both think of ourselves as Good Photographers, even Art Photographers – actually, I am speaking for myself here and only imagining for Peter – but we both are Fine Art Photographers. In that we both think about what we are doing and what we are trying to show and we both have a good eye. But, when blogging, and we were both thinking blogging as we went around the Black Rock – we have to tell a story and that means we have to take pictures that push a narrative. We don’t have the luxury of  indulging in 100 pictures of patterns on the desert floor and I think that is a good thing. It is also a thing that will play out later on this trip.

As an aside, in 1988 – man that was long ago! – I had the opportunity to photograph Machu Picchu with nobody around. It was wonderful – wonder filled – and I got some great shots. I also got about 15o shots of stone walls and shadows. I was also chewing coco leaves which may have been a factor, but almost every one of the shots was worth framing as an image. One hundred and fifty shots of stone walls and shadows….On film, five rolls. Jeeeze! End aside.

After the Blackrock, we went back to the Smoke Creek area. It was getting windy and colder and dusty and – most importantly – the light was getting flat. We figured we would drive  down to the Smoke Creek creek to see if we could find a place to camp out of the wind. On the way, we found a couple of hummocks that we decided to walk to. That walk turned out to be a bit longer as we walked past the hummocks and down to the temporary wetland by the edge of the playa.

 

But the light was flat and my imagined picture of the fence running into the water  à la Christo didn’t pan out. Photography is capturing light – especially landscape photography – and without good light, even the most stunning scene looks dull.The grandest vista, flat.

After wandering down to the actual Smoke Creek lookinbg for a sheltered campsite, we went back to a campsite just south of last night’s.

It was warmer than last night and the same immense space but the wind was picking up and the clouds were getting that rounded look which is never a good sign. After sunset, we got a feeble show of color but not much.

To be continued and to see another take on the day from Peter, go here.

 

 

 

 

 

A trip to the mountains west of death Valley cont.

After driving all day Thursday, we all slept in on Friday.

But it did not take very long before the sun got bright enough and hot enough to wake us. After a quickie breakfast, we packed up


and hurried over to the Eureka Sand Dunes.

The Eureka Dunes are not very large or famous but they are among the highest dunes in the United States at over 650 feet above the valley floor. They look smaller because they are framed by the striped limestone cliffs of the Last Chance Range that rise up 3000 to 4000 feet higher. Sand dunes are caused by wind blowing across the valley floor and picking up fine dust and sand; as the wind hits the higher mountains, it slows down, loses energy, and drops its heavy load. One thing that I find interesting is that the the individual grains of sand are constantly changing but the size and shape of the dunes do not.

As an aside, after getting home I realized that, with four people on our trip, I took alot less pictures than I usually do when I am only with Michele. Among things I didn’t take pictures of were the beauty of the sand dunes. Fortunately, Kirk Moore has some wonderful sand dune pictures over at his website. I highly recommend that you take a look. End aside.

By the time we got to the dunes, it was starting to warm up and the dunes were getting very bright. We hiked up about half way, maybe 350 to 400 feet, on sand that got looser and looser.

About the time that the day starting getting really hot,  heading towards triple digits. We got back in the truck and looked for shade. First it was back to the main road and then over the Last Chance Range into Death Valley itself. As we started over the last pass before Death Valley, we started seeing more plants in bloom. First the Beavertail Cactus, also known as the Pricklypear Cactus and probably known as some other names which is why people who like plants and go looking for them in the wild end up using the botanical name. In this case, Opuntia basilarus.  Just as we got to the pass overlooking upper Death Valley, we came across lots of clumps of Desert Aster, AKA Mojave Aster, or Aster mohavensis.

Then it was down into Death Valley, past Crankshaft Crossing, and on to Scotty’s Castle where we had lunch in the shade.

 

 

A trip to the mountains west of Death Valley

Last Thursday I, along with my wife Michele and our friends Howard Dunair and Basha Cohen, spent the day driving down Highway 395.  Highway 395 runs from Canada to somewhere in the Mojave Desert.  Between Reno, where we got on to Big Pine, where we got off, 395 runs just to the east of the Sierras. Reno is at about 4500 feet and Big Pine is at about 4100,m but, from Reno, the road climbs to a pass of over 8100 feet so Big pine seems much lower.

The Mojave desert is the the UFO desert, the wacko desert, and it seems to have seeped up the 395 corridor.  About an hour south of Reno, we ran into a guy who was pulling a cross from San Francisco to, I think, St. Louis. He had been saved by Jesus and wanted to save others. Like other people I have met who have been saved, he was sincere, open, passionate, and living so far from my reality as to be incomprehensible. I do admire his conviction, however.

 

Miles later, web got to an overlook and view spot with a guard rail. The guard rail has become a poster board for – for lack of a better word – travel stickers. I think that I first saw a bunch of travel stickers stuck on the windows of a a store – for foreigners – at the edge of the Sahara desert. Now I notice them anywhere tourists pass by, such as a guard rail at a view spot. Here – as Michele poinbted out – was an interesting group that showed one evolution of the Keep Tahoe Blue sticker.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As we moved south, after crossing the high point of Highway 395, we dropped from one basin to another, each one lower and warmer with the Sierras on our right getting higher and higher. Mile after mile.

 

Finally, at Big Pine, we turned left off of the highway and drove towards the deep desert.

And once we reached Eureka Valley, we stopped to drink a toast to the road.

To be continued….

Red Rock Wilderness Act

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I love Utah. Especially southern Utah. The hiking around Escalante is other-worldly beautiful.  In Coyote Gulch, there are places you can wander down the stream barefoot. There are natural arches, wildflowers in the spring, Native American ruins, cottonwoods turning yellow in the fall. It is a paradise.

But I don’t live there. I live in California – for a lot of reasons. Today, I got an email from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (AUWA) promoting the Red Rock Wilderness Act. While looking at the map of proposed wilderness lands,

Utah Map
I was shocked at how much area the new Wilderness Act will put aside. I am sure it is all ravishing country – at least every place on the map, marked for wilderness, that I have been to is ravishing – and that is part of Utah’s problem. Everyplace in southern Utah – east of, say, Beaver – is stop the car knockout. Really, everyplace. Even places that are no place.

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Hyway 24 senset

In looking to insure my Congress persons had co-signed the bill – Eshoo did, Boxer did, Fienstien did not – I noticed that not one Utah Congress person had. I didn’t expect Orin Hatch or Bob Bennett to have signed, but not one Utah representative has signed. Not the Demo from downtown Salt, Lake City, not one. It got me thinking; Just how much National open space do we jam down a states throat.

I love this area. I love hiking in it. I love camping in it. Just not enought to live there. And that is the rub.

 

 

 

My 70th birthday trip over Mono Pass and down Mono Creek: part 3

(For part1, go here; for part 2, go here)

Tuesday morning, everybody slept in. Except for me, that is. I got up when I woke up at about 7 and watched the sun light up the bright granite faces across the valley from our camp and down into the valley that we would be hiking through in the next couple of days.

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As the sun got higher, it started coming through the trees, highlighting and backlighting patches of flowers and grasses. I wandered around like a kid in a candy shop.

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Our original plan had been to move our camp down valley the first day and then explore from there. But we had an excellent camp and, as we talked about it, explored a little, and looked at our maps alot; staying right where we were became a better idea. We were above 10,000 feet which meant we couldn't have a fire, but the campsite had lots of flat places to sleep, few mosquitoes, and no dreaded deer flies which we were told we would find further down canyon.

The plan became to stay here, take it easy, and wander down to the Fourth Recess Lake – about 1/2 mile away and down 500 feet – for a mid-day lunch.

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After hanging out for a while and exploring a little – very little – around the Fourth Recess, it was time to go back to camp. This was our second day we ended it by doing a little laundry. 

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