Desert Visitor – me!

To many people the word desert conjures up images of dunes, rippling sand, cactus and brutal temperatures.  While some of that might be true, many deserts are far from that.  Their lushness and color just might surprise you.  Even though I’ve never lived near one, I’ve always loved the desert.  High desert especially.  That’s one of the reasons I keep returning to the west.  The immensity of it just gets to me.  The ever-changing face of it.  Here are some of my favorite desert images from my recent trip to California.

First is a sunset taken just outside Bishop at the start of Silver Canyon.  Unfortunately no clouds came to play so I was very glad the earth brought its own colors.

I just love this next one.  It’s the same sunset, but with the hill in shadow and the sun lighting up that terrifically fluffy plant.  I have no idea what it is, but I love it.  I think it’s the ribbon of trail leading up and out of the frame that makes it so magical for me.

Ok, so this next one isn’t so much desert as mountains, but in the Sierras they go together.  The colors in this are just amazing and again, made up for the lack of clouds.  I think this is my first ever shot of alpenglow – that pink glow of wonderfullness on the snowy peaks.

Of course the desert is not all soft colors and gentle hills.  It’s mostly a harsh environment that takes willpower to survive in.  Except for the sunrise shot, the others were all taken with a pretty stiff wind blowing. So much so that my long exposures lack clarity because my lightweight, travel tripod wasn’t heavy enough.  That wind was nothing.  A few days later in Mono Basin we had steady wind in the 20 mph range with frequent gusts up to 50mph.  Unreal.  It made it very difficult to deal with and I worried that my camera would be clogged.  The grit flew everywhere!  Up my nose. In my eyes.  I swear it took 10 minutes to rinse my hair in the shower that night.  Mostly it was pumice from the volcanoes that created this whole valley.  It’s so light that it flies in wind.

Anyway, these next two shots are taken right near the Mono Craters.  It was one of the only times the harsh light actually worked in my favor.  The fire was recent; in the last couple of years and not a thing is growing yet.  Nothing.  Zip.  It was pretty creepy actually because other than the unrelenting wind, nothing moved or made a sound.  No birds.  That was the most noticeable. Compare it to the next shot where the desert has come back after a much earlier fire.

The proximity of a big lake, mountains and desert makes for some extreme weather.  No doubt these clouds had something to do with the wind.  Aren’t they great?  Like the clouds that hid the alien ships in Independence Day.

Not the most intimate of portraits. Believe me I felt my visitor status the whole time I was out there.  So overawed by it all I had very little time to really get to know it.  Besides that I had to balance my photography with our vacation and not drive my ever-patient husband crazy.  Only once during the whole trip did I feel my photo mania irritated him, so I dialed back and we were good.