Iceland 2005
LightOpt
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.
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.
Embracing Distractions: Mason Valley – Seaman Range – Lunar Craters
“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.“
NvGO Notes 2025.03.14
Maybe high points don’t have to be the goal. I established my High Points quest in the 1990s to encourage my exploration of the Nevada outback. I knew summit goals could guide me as I traversed Nevada’s Basin and Range and grew familiar with its amazing variety of desert landforms. Over 30 intervening years, I was not as persistent in my high-point pursuit as I could have been – I missed several years or went months at a time without visiting a summit, but my exploration has been almost ceaseless as I worked on a wide variety of geoarchaeological projects and managed to summit 130 of Nevada’s 317 (or so) named ranges. I grew more patterned and regular as I began writing about the excursions. I am, however, due for change.
I love walking hills and will continue to do so, but the list has become mildly oppressive. My desire to experience Nevada’s variety of places and landforms is no less, but I found myself focusing on the summit without slowing to take time and experience a place. The value and pleasure of creating images and mapping landforms was, at times, forgotten or set aside. I will also admit that as I age, I am getting slower on the uphills (and downhills), so more time is needed to attain each summit, taking time away from other desires. I rarely, if ever, sit to watch for wildlife or changes in lighting on an outcrop or rock art panel. Something is often missing.
I begin to realize this as I circle the Worthington Hills in south-central Nevada, looking for a way through the recent snow. The ridges below the summit look great in parting clouds, but I am alone and cutting steps on the steep slopes I had hoped to climb does not seem prudent. I thought I had best leave the Worthingtons for another time and head to a lower set of hills on the White River near Hiko, snow-cover should be less there. I did not want to ‘waste’ a drive this far into southeastern Nevada and not get a summit, so I drove on – Distraction #1. Although I was surrounded by amazing scenes of snow-lined and cloud-wrapped peaks above Joshua Tree sharpness, I did not pause.
As I approach the Hiko Hills, I find a long stretch of irrigation pivots fenced behind ‘no trespassing’ signs. It is late in the day, so I decide to venture around the fields and gain the high point in the morning. I turn into the foothills of the Seaman Range and eventually find a faint two-track that leads to a secluded alcove among a maze of granite outcrops, like a lonely version of the Alabama Hills. Distraction #2. A desire to explore the outcrops begins to take precedence; attention to the nearby hills fades.
I set camp and wander until after dark, returning to my little camp as snow begins to fall. There is enough wind to push the feathery flakes sideways, and soon an inch or two of snow powders the bitterbrush and sage and covers my tent and field boxes. Distraction #3 – these are getting healthier as I push the any high point further from my mind, wanting only to wander the granite for images in the morning light. I will probably have fog in the desert!
The squalls clear overnight, and the moon takes over, adding bright ambience to haunting calls of a Great Horned Owl. I crawl out of the tent in the pre-dawn as the moon sets beyond Mount Irish. Snow brightens slowly, while the fog teases from the canyon of the White River, far to the east. It is not adding to the intrigue of the nearby hoodoos and spires, but at least I was not wrong completely; it is here, sort of. I grab my gear and lose myself among the rocks.
I cannot say that I came away with portfolio imagery, but it was the most fun I’d had in a long while photographing. Distraction #4 – I could not care less about the Hiko Hills except to enjoy the fog along their distant slopes. I would not be hiking any hills today, and that was OK.
After a wonderful morning, the snow melting almost immediately with the sunrise, I head back onto Highway 93, traipsing through a couple Wildlife Management Areas, eventually turning toward Lunar Craters National Natural Landmark. Distraction #5 – I was now excited about scouting locations, thinking about landforms I could document, and enjoying an excursion without goals. I became practically joyful considering how the ‘distractions’ allowed me the freedom to develop a refreshed approach to Second Friday and excursions into the Nevada outback.
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I never thought I would climb every high point on my list, it has always been aspirational, something to keep me going, something to highlight the lesser-known places – why else would I even think about visiting the Hiko Hills? But I really do not need the list, the intrinsic value, beauty, and curiosity of our public lands – now facing challenges unpredictable – is aspiration and inspiration enough. We will see where the distractions lead.
Keep going.
Please respect the natural and cultural resources of our public lands.