When I go on vacation, I need another vacation after I get home just to recuperate! Sunrise shoots mean you start out before dawn. Sunset shoots mean you stay until the last light has faded below the horizon. These few hours are what photographers call the “sweet light.” It can be stressful and tiring; and at the same time exhilarating, exciting, inspiring, and “so worth” whatever effort it took to get there. It’s what the passion is all about.
This year’s vacation adventure took us west to the Mojave Desert in California for ten days in late September. Our first stop was Joshua Tree National Park, home of the twisted, spiky, and prickly oddity called the Joshua tree. It looks part cactus but is actually a giant member of the lily family and grows but a mere one-half inch in one year.
Then we traveled north to Death Valley National Park—the hottest, driest, and lowest place in North America. I have photographed this wonderful, wild sanctuary before, in awe of the rolling sand dunes and crusty salt flats. Badwater Basin is 282 feet below sea level! But I had not been able to visit the Racetrack. The passion drew me back to this “field” of cracked clay and solitary stones devoid of vegetation.
You can drive to the Racetrack on your own, but we reconsidered when the Park Ranger told us they would only rescue stranded people from the desert heat—not your vehicle. We hired a Pink Jeep—specially equipped for navigating rugged, off-road terrain—that came with a guide. Twenty-four miles of rocky, bone-jarring, dirt road later we arrived at the parched lakebed. How did the stones get out there? Current theory suggests the stones are moved by strong winter winds once it has rained enough to fill the lakebed with just enough water to make the surface muddy and slippery. It’s amazing, eerie, and one of nature’s mysteries, for no one has ever actually seen a stone move.
I could not leave without one last trek back into the desert. What fun it would be to come back some day with a model . . . .
