I am blearly eyed.  We have been trying to escape the clutches of Las Vegas for two days now and three aborted departures in just a hair over 24 hours.  I’ll write a blog on that next time, but now, I need to finish posting the blogs I wrote while we had iffy-to-no Internet service back in Death Valley.  It has been catch-up posting time ever since!

This was our final day of scouting. We have had a great time, gotten some quite nice images, and feel very comfortable with our preparations for the 2012 alumni and advanced workshop.

First, we stayed in a really wonderful B&B just outside one of the park entrances.

Jan makes fabulous breakfasts, and Gary waits on us with a genial hospitality that belies his retired status as a Lieutenant Colonel in the Marine Corps. We can’t wait to return next year and have already made our reservations.

There were some areas we wanted to revisit and some locations we had not yet really explored.

We returned to the site of one of our moon-rise locations and found some neat skies.

There were wispy clouds that drifted across the blue, creating wonderful patterns and offering good back-drops for our photographs. A plane fortuitously created a contrail for us .. at an artful angle to boot!

We meandered along one of the trails we had not time to explore our first day here. We found lots more possibilities for photographing, including these feathery shrubs that shone in their back lighting.

Arnie and I both attracted to them and scrambled over rocks to get a good vantage point.

There was a shot I had in mind. We had missed it previously, and with no place to turn around, we had run out of photographing time to do the loop and return to the location if we wanted to accomplish the other items on our wish list for scouting.

The Joshua Trees only appear in a very few parts of the country, mostly in the Mojave Desert at altitudes between 1,300 and 5,900 feet.

It amazed Arnie and me when we would suddenly find ourselves in one of these “forests,” as to us, we could see no reason whey they should be here and not in any multitudes of theres.

The other day when we came through, the backlit grasses added light and interest to the well-spaced Joshua Trees against the soft contours of the mountains. We stopped here and there as I sought the right combination that worked for me.

Finally, crossing the sandy lane, I found what I wanted.

We can’t wait to return next year and show our participants the various personalities of this relatively little-known National Park.

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