"i had a dream of you last night, i was all alone in the desert, surrounded by darkness on a desolate playa, and then you came to me and gave me light, you were the moon...i knew it was you, for you were the brightest of all the heavenly bodies, and something of this sort of certainty come but once in a lifetime" ― bodhinku, i had a dream
taken on 11-10-2019 under a (nearly) full moon sky, pictured here is a scene from death valley in the mojave desert, very very far away from any people and civilization...this is a remote wilderness area of the park and is only accessible via dirt roads and 4wd...an unforgiving and desolate area far below sea level where there is no internet, no cell phone coverage, no technology, no traffic, no other vehicles...
i loved being here, being disconnected from the world again for a spell, and yet so reconnected to nature, seeing a part of the wild world untouched by man, as it has been for millions of years here...not another soul for miles and miles, only myself and my good friend, and my aussie sheppard, my pup, besos...the "lowest souls" in the western hemisphere all weekend (at times we were close to -300ft below sea level!)
this is an eerie landscape formed in the heat and pressure that is very unique to desert surfaces which are markedly below sea level (-275 feet below sea level here)...and pictured here are natural shapes made by a thin layer of salt crystals (similar to ice) that are blanketing over the top of a very silty, slick, and dense mud layer beneath that holds moisture, but still dries out and cracks from the desert's extreme heat in places, and these dry cracks make edges that rise more than the middle parts (much like the edges of brownies or pan cookies) and create seams in the salt layer above it, creating the formations and shapes you see here...
what makes this image so starling beautiful is a combination of light sources surrounding me as i stood there transfixed and mesmerized by all i was seeing, truly a gift for my eyes, and such a lucent light holding me in pure admiration of mother nature...sharing in this moments with me was my new doggie at my feet, and my good friend a few feet away from me capturing this luminous display of light with his camera same as me...
the main light for this image obviously came from the moon, but what you do not see, is the remnant light behind me from already set sun, the blue hour as photographers call it, a beautiful afterglow of shorter wavelengths of red light that was mashing and mixing around me with the new light coming from the rising full moon, longer violet wave lengths of light coming over the mountains to the east before me, as i stood at -275ft below sea level, i was simply in awe of the lightshow i was seeing, a perfect lucent light...
i took only a few images (since my images are long exposures), and this particular one is one of the few that stood out and glowed better than any of the others for some reason i cannot explain, very noticeably more lucent on the back of my camera on this evening...
a side note...the strange salt crystals layer was like walking on thin ice, yet very spongy and cushiony, breaking through to the slick muddy layer underneath very often and then slipping with each step...very strange, and unnerving at times, like walking on slippery bed mattress for miles...
and yet another side note...i just returned to this spot on january 19, 2020 and this entire area of badwater basin in death valley is very delicate and susceptible to the weather elements, and with this being a basin, and with the extra rains from the winter, this entire area filled up with water in december 2019, which literally erased everything you see in this image, flattened and leveled it all out, smoothing out the entire area, removing all the nooks and crannies and rises and ridges in the mud layer under the salt crystals...another case of mother nature erasing her work, to start all over again with the summer heat and unforgiving temperatures to change this desert landscape back again into something infinitely different...
“the film of evening light made the red earth lucent, so that its dimensions were deepened, so that a stone, a post, a building had greater depth and more solidity than in the daytime light; and these objects were curiously more individual...the earth contributed a light to the evening” ― john steinbeck, the grapes of wrath
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