Category Archives: Death Valley

Easter in Death Valley: Holy Saturday

California, Death Valley

 

 

Or, more accurately, Easter in Death Valley National Park, because we spent most of the time outside of the Valley itself. Or, even more accurately, we spent most of the time near a graben known as Death Valley. A valley is eroded by water, like the Mississippi Valley or the Ohio Valley; a graben is a low area, formed by a chunk of the earth’s plate, that has dropped. Because of its plant life, Death Valley is considered in the Mojave Desert – show above as the little blue line in the north western part of the Mojave – but, geologically, it is in the Basin and Range Province.

The Basin and Range Province is an area where the land is being pulled apart in an east-west direction. In other words, each year Reno, in the western part of the province, is being slowly pulled further away from Salt Lake City just east of the province. Not each year, actually, but in fits and jumps over a period of millions of years. As the land is pulled apart, it is split into blocks, one side tilting up and the other side tilting down. The up sides are mountains and the downsides are graben. The deepest graben is Death Valley.

Along with Gina Matesic and Courtney Gonzalez, Michele and I drove south and then east and then north on Good Friday and camped just off of  the Big Four Mine Road in the Panamint Valley (another graben). The night was chilly but we we woke to clear skies and no wind on Holy Saturday.

The plan was for Gina, Courtney, and Michele to spend the day walking to the Panamint dunes while I went up to the end of the road and then hike the canyon behind the Big Four Mine (a lead and Silver mine that was last mined in 1952). Their hike would be somewhere between seven and eight miles with a elevation gain of about 1,000 feet and my hike would be much shorter with a bigger elevation gain.

On my way up the canyon, I had passed the Big Four Mine which, apparently, had its heaviest usage during WWII when it was renamed the War Eagle Mine. According to a report done for the BLM – Bureau of Land Management for those of you who haven’t spent much time in the wilderness areas of the west – 370 tons of ore was extracted from the war Eagle between 1944 and 1945 averaging 16.6 percent lead, 12.5 percent zinc and 2.6 ounces of silver per ton. If my math is right, that is about $160,000 at today’s prices, for two years of hard work – in a very inhospitable place – for more than a few men and enough equipment to haul it 150 miles across the desert. It doesn’t seem like as much fun as we were having.

On my way back down the canyon, I stopped to wander around the mine site. There wasn’t much there and I was struck by how unlevel everything was. Just walking around was a balancing act.

Then it was time to ogle the local cacti, check out the view and drive back to meet Gina, Courtney, and Michele, and on to downtown Death Valley.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The genius of Richard Misrach

Art, Death Valley, Photography

I have been going to the California desert – on a pretty regular basis – for about 35 years. The great majority of that time has been when the light was hot and flat, washed out, the colors dull. Almost every photographer working in the desert shoots during what is called the sweet light or golden hour – between about an half hour before sunrise to about two hours after sunrise and the reverse – sort of – around sunset. Richard Misrach shoots during the middle of the day when the light is flat and washed out and his photographs looks like the desert actually seems to look when most people are actually looking at it.

Most “fine art photographers” tend to not use normal lenses, especially in the desert, with the wide angle being a perennial favorite. So there is some point of interest in the foreground but the real photograph is often the background. Art Wolfe is a terrific photographer; he is a photographer who does – more or less – conventional images in a conventional way better than anybody.  I love his shots but their strength is that they are not what most people see when they go to the desert.

Richard Misrach strength is that his shots show what most people see and are impacted by in the desert.

I love Misrach – his images – and he has had a huge impact on my photography but I have never been quite sure why I am so attracted to them. I have never been sure how he made them work. Over the weekend, we saw the same Misrach photographs displayed at both the Oakland Museum and the Berkeley Art Museum. (It was interesting how the same photographs took on a different feel – tone is better – when they are displayed differently. I preferred the Oakland show, BTW.) More importantly, for me, the two shows helped me understand Misrach’s photography much better.

Now, I think that the genius of Misrach is not in the content of his photographs – which are often pretty mundane – but in how that photograph is played, for lack of a better word. First his images – photo talk for pictures – are huge – like five by six feet huge – and that makes a big difference. And sharp; 8″ by 10″ camera sharp (or, if shot today, huge megapixel sharp).  It is easy to almost get lost in the photographs, they almost become a real life view. He has had the guts to just go for an outrageous size and the impact is worth it (except that they are too big for most homes. Second, the images are desaturated. Just like the desert light, at any time but the golden hour, is desaturated.

It will be fun to see how this plays out in my photography.

 

 

 

 

 

A nostalgia trip to Death Valley 2

California, Camping, Death Valley, Sierras, Steve Stern's Field Notes From A Random Walk Through Life

We have probably camped just off the Hole in the Wall road almost a dozen times. We can pretty much find all the good camping spots in the dark which is how we got there last night. It is near downtown Death Valley and because it is about 3.5 miles up a unpaved road and behind a rock formation – we are not supposed to camp within 3 miles of a paved road – very quiet with no light pollution. We camped is a nice intimate area that opens into a larger valley.

Because we were so close to our old haunts, we decided to visit a couple of them, starting with Dante’s View just a couple of miles up the paved road. Dante’s View is on the crest of the Black Mountains at about 5,500 feet, overlooking  Badwater, the lowest point in North America at about 280 feet below sealevel.

 

Death Valley is not actually a valley but a graben or basin. A valley is caused by a river eroding the land and a graben is caused by a block of the earth dropping, usually with parallel mountains on each side. In this case, the water that runs into death Valley does not flow out, it evaporates, leaving salts and minerals behind. In February of 2005, after a very unusual, rainy, winter, the valley – OK, graben – actually became a very shallow lake.

Looking down at the salt patterns, sometimes they almost look like clouds.

No trip to our old haunts would be complete without visiting Furnace Creek Inn, where we got married 18 years ago.

We decided to camp off a favorite, easily accessible, road in the north of the Panamint Valley – really another basin or graben to the east – which would put us about an hour closer to home and give us some time to photograph the fall color on Highway 395. But it was starting to cloud up and I was getting concerned that the weather – which had been warm and windless so far –   would turn nasty. When we got to the Panamint, everything was clouded over but it was warm and still.

It is always good to remember that the reason this is a desert is because it does not rain here very often. Even though it was overcast, the chances of rain – at least any meaningful rain – were pretty slim. The big problem would be the wind.

As an aside, just off the Big 4 Mine Road, is a old abandoned car. One abandoned car! A Buick. I have probably passed it ten times. Now there are two and I can’t figure out which is more improbable; somebody dragged another car up the road and dropped it or there were always two cars and I mis-remember. Intellectually, I know that the later must be true, BUT I so distinctly misremember that there was only one car. End aside.

As I wandered around the – now – two cars, Ed came over, took one look, and said Look, there is a baby rattlesnake. And there – between the two cars, in a place I had just walked by – it was. The first rattlesnake I have ever seen in Death Valley in over 30 years of looking.  Crotalus stephensi – Panamint Rattlesnake – Crotalus is from the Greek for rattle and it was named after somebody named Stephen. This little guy did not rattle or even move and there is only so long you can watch anything that lays there like a rock, so we moved on, looking for a place to throw down our bags.

Or, more accurately, a place to set up some chairs and sit around, gabbing.

Looking around, it was pretty easy to believe we were the only people in the valley, certainly the only people within sight. As the sun went down, the clouds started to clear and the sky put on a show that seemed to be just for us.

The next morning, we were up nice and early, said Goodbye to the Panamint and headed for home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A nostalgia trip to Death Valley

California, Camping, Death Valley, Photography,

After driving through Yosemite, over Tioga Pass, down Highway 395, and east on the Big Pine Road, Michele, Ed Dieden, and I got to Eureka Valley as the sun was going behind the Saline Range. We set up camp in the twilight, ate barbecued Polish sausage and zucchini, and went to bed. We woke the next morning just in time to see the Saline Range light up. Part of the plan was to go over to the Eureka Dunes to photograph but the day was windless and the dunes were pretty marked up with footprints. Rabbits, lizards, coyotes, and people footprints – including somebody walking bare foot.

Still, in the early morning light, the dunes were haunting and the Last Chance Range behind them seemed dark and moody.

The night before had been colder than we expected and we decided to bail on going to the Race Track because it was a little more than 3,000 feet higher and that much colder. We decided to drop down into Death Valley its actual self where it would be much warmer.

On the way, we decided to revisit Titus Canyon. Titus Canyon is a drive that starts in the Amargosa, the next valley to the east of Death Valley, and then wanders through the Grapevine Mountains before dropping through a deep canyon back into Death Valley proper. It is one of the classic – meaning ranger approved Official League – drives that usually can be done in a car. Michele and I had not done the drive in twenty years and had forgotten how spectacular it is.

Of course it was alot more crowded than we are used to.

Michele had been driving, but, when we got to the actual canyon, Ed took over the driving chores and we walked for a while.

From there, it was back into the valley and a drive to below sea level then up The Hole in the Wall Road to 2,000 feet where we had a steak dinner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marble bath at Steel Pass

California, Death Valley, Photography

 

 

Several years ago  – probably more looking at how much less I weighed  – I was involved in what I like to call The Marble Bath Gambol. At Wendel Moyer’s suggestion, several of us installed a marble bath at Steel Pass where one did not seem to exist but was shown as Marble Bath on many maps. It had been increasingly likely that the area was going to be annexed into Death Valley National Monument which was then going to be upgraded to a National Park – the highest level of protection and control. Wendel felt that the park would need a real Marble Bath but it would have to be done before the area was actually a park.

The installation did involve a certain disregard for the rules and regulations governing the installation of a structure in a Wilderness Area but it was felt that the end result justified the violation.

Somewhere, I have a bunch of pictures of the whole thing but my picture storing protocol has been pretty casual and I am not sure where to even start looking for them. But, today, while looking for something totally unrelated, I ran into this picture.