It’s now been a month and a half and both of my compatriots have shared their words and photos, I guess its my turn to share what I got on our trip out to the middle of nowhere.
Please click the photos to view larger and in more detail.
In spaces like this, it’s nearly impossible to judge distance and travel times. We stood on this highway waiting to move for traffic coming from the distant mountain ranges, but it’s as if they were frozen to the vanishing point. Before we left, we tried driving all the way over ourselves - it took nearly an hour to even reach the foothills while over the speed limit the entire way.
After driving out from near Monterey, CA to Vegas and retrieving Andy and Gavin in what can only be described as temperatures that’d make Satan sweat, we drove deep into the night to reach the Border Inn and Casino (between Nevada and Utah) around 2 AM. The next morning, we were greeted by the Great Basin itself - a basin so vast I would legitimately be nervous to cross if I didn’t know there was already a national park and people that lived here year-round.
And while the hard-to-comprehend enormity of the landscape and the neigh impossibility of satisfactorily capturing it in photos stayed with us throughout the trip, it actually wasn’t what we came for. This is one of the darkest sky sites in the US, and we timed it up with a summertime high-visibility Milky Way galactic center and a new moon phase.
In the back of our minds, we had to reconcile with the fact that we may have seen our best stars driving out to the desert - that we may have overcast days with thunderstorms in the evening or otherwise fail in our quest to see the center of the galaxy we all live in. The first full night was unfortunately just that.
We loaded into the Sequoia, drove up Wheeler Peak (one of countless times that weekend), and waited for the summer sun to drop through the clouds and below the horizon.
And drop it did, giving us an exquisite palette of desert colors with a nice breeze, dropping air temp, and (the rarest aspect of all) absolutely no air or road traffic noise. Unfortunately, the clouds continued to roll in to cover the sky full of stars, and I honestly didn’t even bother with editing those photos because - spoiler - the next night worked out perfectly.
One last shot across the valley before the sun left us for the evening. The mountain peaks on the left side would be where the Milky Way rose above the horizon the next night.
The next day was our last, so we decided to make the trek up to see the bristlecone pines. 2.8 miles, 566 feet of elevation, and some wonderful banter dispersed between heaving breaths as we realized that starting at 9,900 ft elevation (and ascending to just short of two miles above sea level) might make this otherwise simple trek a little more difficult than expected.
There weren’t too many worthwhile photos to be had on the walk up, but sometimes that’s nice. Just getting to take in the sights and sounds while feeling your body exert itself and know that you’re alive and healthy - it’s something that can’t be taken for granted. One photo I had to stop for was this valley of boulders above: all 3+ feet across and lots of them with seemingly nothing underneath, held in place purely with the friction of neighboring blocks.
Reaching the bristlecone pines themselves was, in a word, religious. To know that these trees were here 5,000 years ago - literally while the beginning of recorded history took place as the first writing systems were developed - and still stand today through thousands of storms, winter snowfalls, summer heatwaves and fires, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed when placing your hand against the ancient beings.
We said our goodbyes to the bristlecones, headed back down to the trailhead, and grabbed some food to recover and wait for sundown. This is also when we took our mandated photos with the state border signs, which were directly across the street from our hotel.
All eyes were on the skies as we headed up the mountain one last time, watching the clouds come and go - using spotty phone service to watch cloud cover satellite imagery and rapidly understanding that the clouds loved to blow in from Nevada and settle over the basin - until at about midnight the clouds finally gave us our opportunity to shoot the clouds of stars much further from Earth.
And it’s interesting because you’ve travelled all this way and prepared your gear and learned what to do when the time comes and then the Milky Way is there in front of you. It feels like you have forever to adjust your settings and shoot it and find new spots and angles, but as you flip back through your photos you can see the Earth rotating and the cloud heading from one horizon to the other. You’re capturing light from stars that may well have died thousands of years ago, and so it’s all so fast and yet time doesn’t seem to matter at all. I love that I achieved the one singular shot I came to get, but the bottom collage of 14 photos (not taken on a professional panoramic tripod head, obviously) has a special place in my heart as well. It feels like what I’d imagine a stack of printed film photos might look like as you try to show your friends how wild it was that the arch of stars went from the mountains on your right across the basin to your left in an unbroken expanse you could never satisfactorily capture with your camera.
And that’s that. The next morning we loaded up with gas and snacks and made our way back 5 hours to Vegas to drop Andy off for his flight, then Gavin and I made our way an additional 8ish hours back across to the coast of California. I have more photos from my time with Gavin visiting, so I do hope you’ll make your way back to check those out as well.
