Dunes, Eureka Valley, Morning. Death Valley National Park, California. January 6. 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Morning light and haze at the Eureka Valley Dunes, Death Valley National Park, California.
This seems like a typical desert scene, right? Hot, arid, a bit of summer haze… It may look that way, but it was 28 degrees when I made this photograph!
At the tail end of my early January photography visit to Death Valley National Park I went north from the Ubehebe Crater area on the long gravel route up to the remote Eureka Valley Dunes, which are described as the tallest dunes in the United States, being nearly 700 feet tall. I decided to visit here at the end of my trip for several reasons – first, believe it or not, I had not been to this major feature in the park before. Second, because the trans-Sierra passes were still open in the strange weather year, by going out the north end of the park I figured I could shorten my drive back to the Bay Area a bit.
I arrived the night before, just in time to shoot a little bit as the last light came and went. Then I spent a very cold night “camping” in the back of my car. I was up reasonably early, but it was so cold that it was very hard to get out of the sleeping bag. Finally I did so, and I put on all my warm clothes and marched around the camping area trying to warm up a bit. Finally, after the morning sun topped the tall ridge to the east, the light arrived and my world began to warm up a bit. Eventually I packed up and started my trip back out to civilization. But first I wanted to stop a ways out in the valley and do some long shots back towards the dunes. This is one of those photographs, made from a ways down the road using a long lens.
Somewhat surprisingly, when I finally got back in my car a bit after 9:00 a.m. and long after the sun arrived, I finally thought to check the outside temperature on my car’s thermometer. At about 9:15, out in the valley, and in the sun… the temperature had finally risen… to 28 degrees!
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.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.
Thanks for stopping by, Greg. Interesting that you mention the Last Chance Range – if those dunes weren’t sitting in front of the range, it would probably be a destination in its own right with those wonderfully exposed strata!
I have been visiting the Sierra for decades, along with many other parts of California – but I had managed to almost completely ignore areas like Death Valley until a bit more than a decade ago when I visited for the first time with a group of kids who were there to, believe it or not, backpack. I won’t forget my first view of the place. We had arrived well after dark and grabbed camp sites at the small camp ground near the junction of highway 190 and the road toward Wild Rose Canyon. I had little idea where we were…
… until I woke up that morning to the stunning view down towards the bottom of the Valley near Stovepipe Wells and across it to the rugged Grapevine mountains, all in the beautiful pastel light of dawn. I think I was hooked, though it took me a few more years to actually start to get to know the place more deeply.
Dan
Glad you made it out to the Eureka dunes. I find that it is an interesting place due to its isolated location; it almost feels like one is on a different planet. I went there several years ago, and climbed to the top of the dunes, and found the views wonderful. The striations in the rock of Last Chance Range are striking. At least for me the dunes are a special place because it is so different from what I’m used to looking at in the Sierras and from the Bay Area. How lucky we are to live in a state that has so much geographical diversity!