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Badwater sunset
The earth is parched over the summer and most of the year. Once in a while the moisture from over the Pacific gets to cross over the Sierra Nevada to The Death Valley. However, during the the rare storms where the moisture laden air crosses the rain shadow, not only does it look spectacular, it also looks as if this place is really to die for.
During the winter of 2016, in the middle of the California drought, I was lucky to get a little moisture carry over the Sierra and shed the much needed water within the Badwater Basin in the Death Valley National Park.
I was focusing on the sunset to the west. Little did I realize what magic nature would reveal. In this land of extreme harshness, where life is ephemeral, the dead twigs and the mud cracks exhibit the harshness of the environment. As ephemeral these things are, the bolt in the blue was even more evanescent and happened in the eastern sky.
My education in Geology has given me the insights in to the ways mud cracks form and/or preserved in the rock records. The colors in the distant mountains, I can explain, but the light in the sky was divine. It vanished as quickly as it appeared. I am glad the camera captures in sub second increments.
The times scale we see in this image spans from a life of a tumbleweed which could spend a season growing and then a few weeks tumbling to propagate the seeds. The mud cracks seem to be a few years or tens of years in the making depending on the composition of the mud or substrate it forms in. The red and green rocks in the mountains gets its appearance from some volcanic rocks that formed during the Miocene some 8-12 MILLION years ago. How long did this spectacle in the sky last? A mere couple of minutes. To take it a step further, how long did the camera take to capture this image? 1 second!
Badwater Basin, Death Valley National Park
February, 2017
Torrents coming down on the Panamint Range before the days end
Crepuscular rays light up the mudcracks
Eastward ho
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