Death Valley Ubehebe Crater

Well today marks one month since I left Jacksonville. It has been a pretty good month and today was a pretty good day. I left early this morning to try to get a jump on people going to Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes in Death Valley National Park and get pictures before the dunes were covered with footprints. Well what I didn’t realize is that yesterday’s footprints don’t go away without a night of high winds. That didn’t happen, so like I said before I had to deal with Mother Nature. What I did was take wide pictures and long shots to try to reduce the noticeability of the footprints. I also looked around for those small that didn’t have any footprints from the last few days. But after looking at the images on the computer I see that I was unsuccessful.

I also took pictures along the roads that I was traveling on. Some of them turned out good. Most of them were taken on my way to Ubehebe Crater. Ubehebe Crater is a large volcanic crater 600 feet deep and half a mile across. Volcanoes like Ubehebe are known as maar volcanoes, created by steam and gas explosions when hot magma rising up from the depths reached ground water.

The intense heat flashed the water into steam which expanded until the pressure was released as a tremendous explosion. The western cluster of Maar volcanoes was the first to form, then the southern cluster, followed by Ubehebe—the largest of them all—possibly as recently as 300 years ago. This information is from the National Park Service. All the pictures that I took today were with my Nikon D4 and my Nikon 28-300mm lens. I used an ISO setting of 200.