Death Valley Trip

Sara, R/S/L, me. We left sunday morning. Weather was a bit iffy, it rained in SB that morning, and with the front passing it was forecast to be windy in the desert. C'est la vie, damn the torpedoes, onwards and upwards....

Took the back way around LA, 126-5-14. Sweet. Snow in the San Gabriels. Mojave (the town) was windy as heck. The windmills on the ridges with snowy Tehachapis in the background made a nice scene. We passed alot of flowers, in retrospect we should have stopped, cause they were better in the Mojave area than the DV area. We were planning on camping at the Trona Pinnacles, where episodes of Star Trek, etc, were filmed, that night. But it was blowing about 60 mph, and the dry lake bed in the area caused that whole valley to be a dust bowl. So we ventured on into the park via Wildrose Rd. The campground was at 4200 feet, and snowy Telescope Peak was not that far away. It got cold. Calzone for dinner. Yummy. The highlight of the day was that I only fell down/got blown over once by the wind. Though I also only got out of the car once....

Next day. Left my hot pink nalgene bottle on the roof overnight, it was frozen/slushy in the morning. Slow morning getting warmed up. Hot chocolate. Sara brought a cornucopia of breakfast items. Mmm, lingonberry preserves. Moved on down the line to Stovepipe Wells. Went below sea level starting there. R/S/L branched off to go to Vegas for the AAG conference. Death Valley was dusty, but not as bad as Trona. I shot pictures of flowers with various cameras. Sara took it all in. It's past my bedtime and I am writing poorly. We ended up driving the famous part of the park at dusk. It was nice. Quiet. Less people. Saw a coyote. Camped on the dirt road that goes south from Ashford Mill. Shot some star trails, we'll see how they turn out when the slide film gets developed. Lots of shooting stars. A UFO, too -- someone's campfire a ways further down the road. Guess that makes it an IFO.

Next day.  Turned out we camped in a pretty nice area. Early morning light is always good, and it led to lots of shadows on the mountains. Drove out thru Shoshone, Baker, etc. The road was pretty most of the way to Baker. I15 was kinda meh. No surprise. Funniest thing this day was there was a butterfly migration going on, and they were committing seppuku on our windshield. Sara isn't big on death, so when a couple got stuck on the wipers she ran them, flicking them off, so she wasn't reminded of the havoc we were causing. So. Lots of driving, some beautiful country. A nice trip.

I had 2 Nikkormat bodies, and used 3 lenses: a 300, 200, and 20. Also a olympus 750uz digi and an olympus 1030sw digi. The 750 is nice cause you can shoot it manually even though it's a relatively cheap digi camera. As of right now you can see the photos from the 750 here. I had to write a program in IDL to automatically remove a glitch in the photos from the 1030, which took a little while, but they are up now. 

This guy has some really bitchin' images -- he stitched together frames to make 180 to 360 degree panoramas. In 2005, the year Death Valley was a lake, due to el niño rain

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I'd been across the country 11 times in a car as a kid, though the last time was in 1993. Of course there have been about 20 road trips in Baja since then, but the American west has largely eluded me. Because it's been a while, I like watching road movies: Two-lane Blacktop, Vanishing Point, Electra Glide in Blue, Smokey and the Bandit, the Great Smokey Roadblock, Every Which Way But Loose/Any Which Way You Can, Wristcutters, the Go-Getter, Into the Wild. I also recommend Gerry, a supremely slow movie, filmed in Death Valley.