VEHICLE-BASED EXPLORATION

It dawned on me the other day that I’ve been blogging a lot lately about our bimobil build and since it’s been a couple of years since we’ve been doing what we love to do the way we love to do it, folks might not remember why Ann and I are so excited bout returning to that way of exploring.  Recently, Ann came across an image she made of Beast, and I thought it would be an excellent way to drive home (like the pun?) why we love vehicle-based exploration and photography.  

Let’s begin not with Beast, but with some photographs I took during our December 2018 trip to Death Valley.  We spent the evening before entering Death Valley in the Alabama Hills just outside of Lone Pine.  The Alabama Hills has some incredible rock formations and has been the set for dozens of Westerns (as in movies).  In fact, you can take a tour (following a printed hand-out route found at a lot of Lone Pine stores) that takes you to various movie locations.  It’s the rocks that we find so interesting and is why we like going back there to explore.

On this occasion we followed a dirt road that took us up a steep incline that eventually looped back down to the main road on the valley floor.  About half-way up the ridge we parked Beast and started hiking uphill over the large rocks to see what we could find.  Noticing what I thought was a big gap behind a giant boulder, I played mountain goat and scurried up the boulder to find an interesting crevasse to photograph.

We wandered around the ridge a bit as evening started to set in. Given the interesting clouds in the sky, we were hoping for a performance and, sure enough, the setting sun didn’t let us down.

And as we made our way back down to Beast, I turned around to make one final image of the sun and atmosphere working its magic on the clouds above.

Now, while I was busy making the first of the photographs above, Ann decided to make a photograph that included Beast down below with more of the Alabama Hills as well as the Sierra Range, and sky, in the background.  Check out the image below.

What I hadn’t mentioned is that this “photo shoot” was an after-dinner photo jaunt up the hill.  And that Beast was parked where we spent the night.  We were actually quite some ways up from the floor of the valley, though it might not look like it.  The dirt road required us to shift into 4-wheel drive to get up it.  Needless to say, there wasn’t anyone else anywhere in the area around us at this hour of the day (most of the folks spending the night stayed on the valley floor, day visitors were long gone).  We had the place, and the views all to ourselves.

Much like the next post, where we spent the night in a pull-off on a trail that sees few travelers even during the best of times, it’s places like these that give us incredible locations for photography in evenings and the mornings.  And it’s vehicles like Beast and our yet-unnamed bimobil that enable us to photograph this way.  No need to drive for hours on end half-awake in the darkness to be in a prime location before sunrise, no need to drive for hours on end exhausted and in darkness to return to a hotel or even a campsite at the end of the day.  All we need is  a capable vehicle that can get us there and serve as a home base, and a location to park it.   

Legally, of course.