Day 3 was actually the purpose of the trip. Woke up at 5am and drove 20 minutes from the campsite to a place called Badwater. This is the lowest point in the US, and during the summer some of the hottest temperatures of anywhere in the world are experienced. The flats of Badwater stretch for miles. Due to the extreme climate, very little water and / or life is sustained and you can walk unimpaired in pretty much all directions. When rain does fall, it goes through a freeze–thaw and evaporation cycles and as the surface becomes dry again, a funky honeycomb pattern is left with the salt. Standing out there in the morning at sunrise, looking over miles of an alien-like surface at the mountains in the distance, it feels like you’re nowhere else on Earth. Pretty cool experience.

After that, we took off round the park. The other place I really wanted to see (The Racetrack where rocks slide over the surface of the ground), wasn’t really reachable so we hung around for until the afternoon and then started to make the long journey back. We’d basically covered 1,200 miles for a quick walk around a dry lake – it was a surprisingly good deal.

On the drive back, we managed to cover a good deal of ground. We wanted to stay just outside Yosemite and visit there the next morning but the pass was closed. At the West entrance to Yosemite though was another small highlight -a little town called Lee Vining overlooking Mono Lake. Mono Lake is a hypersaline lake (salt concentrations greater than those found in the ocean) which has left the shoreline looking like it harbors mini icebergs of salt. We arrived just after sunset and stopped there for a quick walk… After that we we kept driving until late in the evening, passing through a snowstorm near Tahoe and finally staying the night in another small town called Susanville. Day 3 of 4 was cool. Pictures follow – taken with a Olympus OM-1 / OM-4 combo + Olympus OM Zuiko glass. The black and white images are shot on Fujifilm Neopan 100 Acros while the colour shots are Kodak Ektar 100. All shots scanned with Nikon Coolscan 5000.

Badwater @ sunrise

Entrance to the river bed

Distant tourists provide some scale against the vast landscape

The Badwater honeycome surface

One more with Akuri to provide some perspective

A shot on the top of Ubehebe Crater within Death Valley

The hill above Sammy’s Castle… Still within Death Valley National Park

Mono Lake at twighlight

Mono Lake

And finally a shot of Sora to end on as the light was fading.