Death Valley National Park
Death Valley National Park – An experiment in texture.
Death Valley is a fabric of visual and tactile quality, an experiment in texture. Miles of patterned ground. A thousand feet of colored bands in bedrock. A vista of repetitive conical alluvial fans pouring out of the mountainsides. Curving crescents of sand formed by waves of wind. Deep canyons of contrasting dark shadows against the brilliant light that reaches the pebbled floor. Hills dissolving into pigments and saturated color. A tactile visual place like a kid’s pop-up picture book with touch and feel fabric.
Death Valley is raw exposed desert that reveals itself, naked, with no cover to hide nature’s geological processes and the physics that give birth to its textural beauty.
Textures fashioned by slow imperceptible dissolution then deposit. Desiccation buckling the resulting hard pan basement of the valley floor.
Textures colored by decaying minerals, uncovered by a punctuated hydrovolcanic eruption that ripped the earth skyward, revealing the folding layers of the earth.
Textures formed by rare rain unable to penetrate impermeable dust covered soil, forming flash floods and channeling currents that carve wine glass canyons or create incisions in the broken skirts at the edge of the colored stone.
Textures shaped by crystallographic symmetry. Salts leached from the rocks, seeps down to the basins below sea level. Salt saturated water form evaporate beds, crystalizing and forming textured polygons.
Textures of green with the rubberized feel of pickle weed, buried in creek beds where only the occasional oasis even gives life a chance. Briny flats of oily water hiding Pupfish living in the salt laden water.
Texture caused by winds that scour the surface to shift the sands into dunes, creating delicate ripples or the miniature avalanches cascading from footsteps left by curious interlopers. The few shrubs that manage to eke out a living are blown over, wrinkled and gnarled.
Textures of rough rock’s unpolished surfaces exposed by orogenic processes pushing the earth’s crust into the sky to catch the early morning light. As the day progresses the rocks shimmer in the heat. Then the jagged mountain profile is silhouetted by the setting sun.
Textures that are the result of a geographical confluence of ideal climatic conditions. 10,000 foot mountains purge the pacific ocean winds of their moisture, leaving a paucity of pluvial precipitation to reach the valley. It is no small anomaly, but a vast parched land, with names like the Devil’ cornfield, Devil’s golf course and Furnace Creek. You sense this raw heat while driving, seeing the landscape that has been formed by heat and water and tectonic forces. The earth has been faulted and folded, uplifted and dropped.
Textured. The feel of the fabric of the earth. The vistas of color and form. Death Valley is an experiment in textural visual and tactile quality. JP Nov 2018
Read MoreDeath Valley is a fabric of visual and tactile quality, an experiment in texture. Miles of patterned ground. A thousand feet of colored bands in bedrock. A vista of repetitive conical alluvial fans pouring out of the mountainsides. Curving crescents of sand formed by waves of wind. Deep canyons of contrasting dark shadows against the brilliant light that reaches the pebbled floor. Hills dissolving into pigments and saturated color. A tactile visual place like a kid’s pop-up picture book with touch and feel fabric.
Death Valley is raw exposed desert that reveals itself, naked, with no cover to hide nature’s geological processes and the physics that give birth to its textural beauty.
Textures fashioned by slow imperceptible dissolution then deposit. Desiccation buckling the resulting hard pan basement of the valley floor.
Textures colored by decaying minerals, uncovered by a punctuated hydrovolcanic eruption that ripped the earth skyward, revealing the folding layers of the earth.
Textures formed by rare rain unable to penetrate impermeable dust covered soil, forming flash floods and channeling currents that carve wine glass canyons or create incisions in the broken skirts at the edge of the colored stone.
Textures shaped by crystallographic symmetry. Salts leached from the rocks, seeps down to the basins below sea level. Salt saturated water form evaporate beds, crystalizing and forming textured polygons.
Textures of green with the rubberized feel of pickle weed, buried in creek beds where only the occasional oasis even gives life a chance. Briny flats of oily water hiding Pupfish living in the salt laden water.
Texture caused by winds that scour the surface to shift the sands into dunes, creating delicate ripples or the miniature avalanches cascading from footsteps left by curious interlopers. The few shrubs that manage to eke out a living are blown over, wrinkled and gnarled.
Textures of rough rock’s unpolished surfaces exposed by orogenic processes pushing the earth’s crust into the sky to catch the early morning light. As the day progresses the rocks shimmer in the heat. Then the jagged mountain profile is silhouetted by the setting sun.
Textures that are the result of a geographical confluence of ideal climatic conditions. 10,000 foot mountains purge the pacific ocean winds of their moisture, leaving a paucity of pluvial precipitation to reach the valley. It is no small anomaly, but a vast parched land, with names like the Devil’ cornfield, Devil’s golf course and Furnace Creek. You sense this raw heat while driving, seeing the landscape that has been formed by heat and water and tectonic forces. The earth has been faulted and folded, uplifted and dropped.
Textured. The feel of the fabric of the earth. The vistas of color and form. Death Valley is an experiment in textural visual and tactile quality. JP Nov 2018
