Tag:desert
Blowing in the wind: I can still hear the sound even though it was many years ago. This was a supply tent, slowly being torn apart by the howling winds, laden with sand, ferocious enough to pit glass. The lighter items had long since disappeared, never to be found. Such winds were relatively rare but we were constantly needing new tents yet always hesitant to deploy them in case the ‘big storm’ came and we ran out of replacements. It […]
There were eight in our group – waiting for the sunrise at the Stovepipe Wells Sand Dunes in Death Valley National Park. The aim had been to capture a starburst as the sun peeked over the Funeral Mountains of the Amargosa Range. The dunes are at their firmest at dawn and the breeze over night has erased most of the footprints from the day before. Get there first and you have pristine dunes to capture. Get there second and there […]
This desert tree was in a shallow wadi in the Haruj area of Libya. 25-years later, I wonder if it’s still there. You can tell that even then limbs had been cut off, presumably for firewood. The shape of the tree was part of the reason for the photo, but most of the reason was because the tree existed at all. The green scrubby bushes show that moisture wasn’t far below the sandy surface here, but where did that moisture […]
The racetrack road runs south from Ubehebe Crater to the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley National Park. It’s a rough, washboarded road and can be quite an uncomfortable trip. The rock pieces are jagged and sharp and there’s not enough room to pass someone coming in the other direction. That’s how we got our flat – we punctured the sidewall while pulling over to let someone pass. We were all surprised to see someone in a regular sedan driving along […]
This photo of a Tunisian Desert Sunset was taken in Tunisia – quel surprise! I only spent a couple of months in the Tunisian desert but I remember it was in the winter. It was cold at night and we were billeted in single-walled canvas tents rather than the heated trailers we used in Libya. I recall we had three-bar electric heaters to try and take the edge off the cold but you could only run two bars at most […]
So here’s a shot of us approaching Tagrifet, looking through a window in the same Twin Otter featured in yesterday’s post. Can’t say I really know much about Tagrifet other than it was at one time occupied by the Italians when they ruled this part of Libya before WWII. The fort is curious to me because of it’s triangular shape. Sitting at one end of a low mesa, other photos I’ll post in the future show the barbed wire defenses […]
