Iceland 2005
Desert nights in Big Bend
It is the heat that gets your attention – and pay attention because one needs to travel wisely in the late spring in Big Bend National Park, but it is the promise of evening birds and late-night dark skies that holds it. I had dropped into Lajitas, Texas, to attend a photo workshop focused on astrophotography in and around the desert, borderland park. Night photography avoids the intense heat of the day, of course, but we also explored various locations to experience the moods of this variegated landscape.
The Big Bend topography is refreshingly disorienting to me. Unlike the regular, linear pattern of the Basin and Range, the mountains of Big Bend seem circular; we travel around and into them, not over and through. Alluvial fans and consolidated pediments extend from the rugged uplands, these are familiar. The Rio Grande gasps for refreshment, barely any flow this time of year – the canyon marking the national boundary more than the river. The Chihuahuan Desert, its incessant volcanic rocks colonized with a wild diversity of arid-adapted plants and animals, is somehow sharper and coarser than our western deserts. Although the landscape is wide open, I feel like I cannot see as far. Between convoluted ridges, gunsight canyons reveal a surprise of distant ranges and mesas, verifying that the desert knows no borders.
While I am not attracted to group excursions typically, I have great friends at Muench Workshops, and their participants are like-minded and lovely to spend time with. I always learn new bits of technique, and with astrophotography, there can be unique skills to apply in the field and in image processing. I forget most of them almost immediately, but that is not for their lack of unselfish sharing and engagement. It takes practice, and more practice, but it remains so much fun.
While I gave full attention to our daily astro tutorials – we would hide away in a cool conference room during the hottest part of the day, I engaged my wanderlust during late afternoon excursions in search of birds and sunset light. I was then ready to settle in with the group to practice dark-sky compositions from blue hour to well after midnight.
Our little group moved between the mountains and canyons, dropping to the river occasionally; anything to feel the evening releasing the heat of the day. Although Wayne and Matt had locations planned, we often detoured when the light caught our attention. They picked some amazing scenes, but our focus was technique so we could have been almost anywhere in the jumble of desert spires and ridges. We practiced variations on focus-stacking, time-blending, and multiple exposures to battle the digital noise of long exposures, high-ISO settings, and heat-affected sensors. We also practiced various low-level lighting techniques to bring warmth and detail to our scenes. The field craft is a bit fiddlier than I am drawn to typically, and the files take quite a bit of patience (and computing power) to process, but the results are, or can be, amazing.
I mastered nothing on this trip, but I was reminded that improvement continues with practice. I may use few of the skills and tricks that well-practiced astrophotographers bring to their scenes, but there are landscapes and landforms in the Great Basin that I want to capture under a night sky, so I will continue to practice (special thanks to Wayne Suggs and Matt Payne). There is nothing like being under a dark sky in a desert or mountain landscape. It heals concessions we make living in cities of artificial light and constant motion, and it wakes up senses we hide from ourselves most of the time. The photos are then reminders that we should go back to the dark, occasionally, to heal and wake up.
Plus, there are birds to enjoy in the blue hour as we wait for the stars to shine.
Keep going.
In memory of my nephew, Robby Young, who we lost so suddenly and too soon, while I was in Big Bend (June 2024). I did not see him enough, and I cannot see him again. But I will always have a reminder of him when under a dark sky, where the stars feel close enough to touch, even as they continue their journeys, far, far away.
Fieldnotes 2025.07.09
Quick camp on Miller Canyon Fan, western Utah
Waypoint: Miller Canyon Alluvial Fan, Sevier Valley, Utah
After a warm day of landform reconnaissance in the Great Basin of western Utah, I camped in a small back-berm playette on the broad alluvial fan of Miller Canyon extending from the House Range in western Utah. The playette – a miniature dry lake – formed behind a relict gravel berm of pluvial Lake Gunnison, building over thousands of years as loessic alluvium scoured from the hillslopes settles behind the abandoned berm. This is the modern setting on the expansive alluvial fan – a small dry lake nestled behind a beach long after the once vast pluvial lake faded and dried, its lakebed shrinking to the playa of the Sevier Basin. The berm provides a stage for photographing storms that try and fail, evaporating into the evening skies of the Great Basin. The variegated color of a juvenile Brown-headed Cowbird greeted me as I rolled out of my sleeping bag the following morning. Altogether, a somewhat typical experience during geoarchaeological fieldwork in the Great Basin Desert. Keep going.
[2024.05.15 — Bonneville Basin Recce with Brian Codding (Univ of Utah) and Daniel Contreras (Univ of Florida); aka, The Strandline Society].
“These images and words are a reflection, simply and wholly, of my respect for our public lands and the public science and occasional art I am, and we are, able to do there. Our ability to create and think are not trivial, and wild space and healthy ecosystems nourish such things. It is here that we will find our better selves, even as the misdeeds of a few threaten much that, until recently, provides for our common good. Keep going.“
Please respect the natural and cultural resources of our public lands.
Wandering White Sands
Waypoint: White Sands National Park, Tularosa Basin, New Mexico, USA
“These images and words are a reflection, simply and wholly, of my respect for our public lands and the public science and occasional art I am, and we are, able to do there. Our ability to create and think are not trivial, and wild space and healthy ecosystems nourish such things. It is here that we will find our better selves, even as the misdeeds of a few threaten much that, until recently, provides for our common good. Keep going.“
A couple times over the past two years, I have had the good fortune to wander among the gypsum dunes of White Sands National Park in south-central New Mexico. My visits dovetail with geoarchaeological research in the Tularosa Basin, where we have been looking, with the help of and collaboration with specialists and volunteers at the National Park Service and friends and colleagues at Holloman Air Force Base, at the context of human and faunal trackways along the margins of pluvial Lake Otero. The footprints are fascinating and perplexing, and the various studies implemented at Lake Otero provide comparison to our approach to somewhat similar ichnofacies on Utah’s Old River Bed Delta, a landform of the Bonneville Basin that supported an expansive wetland between 12,600 and 8,800 years ago. By bookending daytime research excursions with walks in the expansive white dunes, I had time to consider the setting, past and present, and its broader implications at a slower pace and without contention. And, sometimes, the light is so good.
The white, gypsum sand that forms the dunes is a result of a long interplay between bedrock of the mountain ranges surrounding the Tularosa Basin, basinward erosion of fine-grained minerals derived from the parent rock, catalysts of groundwater chemistry, and climate change. In the Late Pleistocene, say, between about 22 and 18 thousand years ago, Lake Otero rose and fell – by day, by season, by decade, by millennium – as runoff battled evaporation and groundwater sought equilibrium in between. These perturbations produced an evaporite soup, at times deep and dilute, and at others shallow and practically viscous. The overlap of conditions from bedrock to basin hydrology are incomparable with almost all other paleolakes in the desert west.
With the warming and drying of the last 14,000 years, the hallmark of the Holocene, a prevailing southwesterly wind scours the exposed bed of crystalline gypsum – the relict product of the Pleistocene chemistry – that bounces and rolls to become sand-sized aggregates of dune-building material; finer particles get carried away to coat the hills in desert loess or circle the globe as aerosol clay. Earth tends toward recycling.
And so, the scoured lakebed becomes the gypsum dunes of White Sands, a process still happening today. The sand subdues and reflects the color of the sky, bending the hues along wind-sculpted crests and swales. Shadows are abrupt until blue hour erases all depth, molding the reflected glow to a calm iridescence; the changes are reversed for sunrise. Although I have visited in the early morning, park hours limit sunrise opportunities to a few minutes; it is sunset that brings productive wandering. That is until park rangers begin the pre-dark patrol, broadcasting the requirement that all wanderers return to their vehicles, leaving the dunes to their nightly rearrangement.
I hope you enjoy this small gallery of images from White Sands. Active dunes are always changing; the photos you capture are yours alone, the winds bring originality. Most visitors do not venture very far into the hills of sand, so it takes little effort to get beyond the occasional messiness of a tracked-up dune. With practice or a reliable GPS, you can be confident of where you are and where your personal trailhead is. And then, you can move slowly, let the light evolve, and make the patterns your own.