Desert Glow: Wildflowers in Death Valley National Park
I know I’m flip-flopping around a lot with images from my recent trips, but this image from Death Valley jumped out at me today when I was scrolling through my Lightroom catalog. I have not even done a first-round edit of this trip, so there will be more to come (hopefully soon).
Death Valley is a place that I could roam for weeks and never tire of it. During my first trip to the park last May, the endless variety of the landscape and the overall experience really appealed to me. We were headed from Zion to Sequoia on an extended summer vacation. The plan was to spend four days camping and exploring Death Valley, but the heat was getting to my husband, so we headed out after less than 24 hours in the park. (I, on the other hand, loved the heat and found that night in our tent, sleeping in 100 degree weather, to be nearly joyous.) Of all the places we were visiting on that trip, which included ten national parks, Death Valley was the place I wanted to be.
During this brief time, I took two images that stick in my mind – one of a storm stirring over a dry playa and an abstract of some cracked mud and sand in the Mesquite Dunes. And why do they stick in my mind? Because I carelessly deleted the memory card with these two photos thinking that I had already downloaded the images and then proceeded to use it again, thus eliminating the possibility of rescuing the images. I had high expectations for Death Valley, but barely got to see it and deleted most of the images from that part of the trip. This only heightened my interest in visiting the park again.
The predictions of a good wildflower season for spring of 2010 were enough to get me to book a flight to Las Vegas for a quick solo trip to the park in mid-April 2010. This turned out to be near-perfect timing, as the alluvial fans on the valley floor were carpeted in yellow flowers and plants were starting to bloom at higher elevations. Note for the future: If you hear that there is going to be a good wildflower season in Death Valley (and you like deserts, hot weather, and flowers), make it a priority to get to the park. I will certainly reschedule almost anything to repeat this trip in the future.
Up until this trip, I had spent less than 24 hours in a “desert” like Death Valley and found that photographing the wildflowers here presented a number of challenges. From a distance, the fields of flowers looked like a dense, yellow carpet. Using a telephoto lens, I was able to compress the scene and record that same feeling in an image. Using a wide-angle lens, on the other hand, resulted in a lot of unsatisfying shots. Up close, the stands of flowers that line the alluvial fans along the valley floor are in fact very scattered. Using a wide-angle lens only exaggerates this. In a 5-foot by 5-foot space, there might be around 10 to 15 plants, each with spindly stems and two or three flowers. Alluvial fans, while beautiful and interesting from a distance, look like every-which-way tire tracks up close. I was not expecting either of these challenges when thinking about the types of images I wanted to capture before my trip. Add wind to the equation and some of the shots I had visualized were quickly disappearing.
The photo above was pure serendipity. The day before, I found some interesting salt formations along the West Side Road. I got up for sunrise, returning to the salt formations I found the day before. After photographing a mildly interesting sunrise, I planned to check out the morning light on the badlands below Zabriskie Point. As I was headed east on the West Side Road, the sun started to crest the Amargosa Range and the flowers started to glow. I slammed on my brakes, grabbed my gear like a maniac, and ran out into a field of flowers hoping that I could get SOMETHING! I had time to try three different compositions before the sun got too bright. Although I would have liked to have more flowers in the foreground (see above, add time-crunch), I am pleased with the way this image turned out.
