Dry Wash, Twenty Mule Team Canyon. Death Valley National Park, California. April 2. 2009. © Copyright 2009 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
A dry wash descends past the barren hills of Twenty Mule Team Canyon in morning shadows, Death Valley National Park.
I made this photograph on an early morning in early April a couple of years ago. I had gone to Death Valley National Park’s Twenty Mule Team Canyon to photograph some folded and eroded patterns in the upper portion of this valley, and a bit after sunrise I noticed a trail heading up a side canyon. I decided to follow it. It started out by ascending the wash shown in the photograph and eventually reached a low saddle along the eroded ridge of between this canyon and the descent to Death Valley itself. When I arrived there, as sometimes happens in Death Valley, I discovered an old vehicle track heading down into the canyon on the other side.
Since I had some other plans for a bit later in the morning, and because I didn’t see anything immediately exciting on the other side of this ridge as the route descended, I instead backtracked into this wash. As my trail crossed the broad area across from this line of hills I looked back toward the main valley and saw this sunlit s-curve in front of the somewhat shaded ridge.
Related: See my extensive posts on Photographing Death Valley
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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