Death Valley Day 5

The rain finally stopped, and the park service managed to get some of the roads open again in and around Death Valley National Park. One of the rangers told me that the road to Badwater Basin had some areas that was covered with 3 to 4 feet of debris and it took 12 hours to clear.

I went back to Badwater Basin in hopes that there would be some water laying on the salt flats. The salt flats are changing all the time. Salt crystals expand and push their way between mud cracks sketching strange patterns on the surface of the salt flats. Passing rainstorms wash off windblown dust and generate a fresh layer of blinding white salt. I was right in believing that after all that rain that there would be water. There was a lot of puffy clouds over the mountains today, so I had to lower my ISO setting to 100 and raise the shutter speed to 800. I also used a circular polarizing filter to make the clouds pop.

After I left the basin I went to Natural Bridge. This is something that I didn’t think that I would see in Death Valley. It is an arch that is 35 feet above the ground and was formed by flooding water. From there I went to Zabriskie Point. A beautiful overlook where you look down into a part of the valley.

You can check out more of these images in my image gallery Death Valley National Park