The World We Knew Is Gone - Nevada.
On May 21st, 2019, immediately after returning home from Big Bed with Penny where we filmed the ending to the short film, I left for another photo trip for The World We Knew Is Gone. This time I flew into Las Vegas with my spacesuit, my camera equipment, and camping gear, and rented an SUV to help me get around to all the different destinations. First stop was the Valley of Fire State Park located an hour east of Las Vegas. It was a wonderland for the vibe and color pallet I was going for. I love red dirt deserts, and Valley of Fire had no shortage of beautiful craggily sandstone to photograph. The only trick was finding places away from everyone else.
My first stop was near the Cabins Picnic Area, where I climbed higher and higher up the sandstone until I was on the other side of a ledge and had plenty of room to roam and get all the photos I wanted.
My usual routine was to scout during midday, then shoot as much as I could around sunset until the last bit of light had gone, then find a safe, dark place to park away from other people, cook a small meal, catch up with my phone if I had signal, and finally get to sleep around midnight. Then I’d wake up around 4am and start driving to the next location so I could hike to the right spot before sunrise and be in the spacesuit just into for the sun to poke over the horizon. I’d shoot until the sun got too harsh, take of the spacesuit, and scout some more. Repeat & repeat.
Finding all these locations required quite a bit of research, especially because the ones that looked the most unfamiliar and alien were the ones with the least amount of info about them online. I spent hours on AllTrails, Bureau of Land Management websites and landscape photography forums finding everything I could on surreal alien landscapes. Sometimes it paid off greatly, like Bisti Badlands in New Mexico. Sometimes it didn’t work so well, like the 5 hours I spent driving to Little Finland, a red sandstone hoodoo wonderland in south eastern Nevada. Because I got within 5 miles of it, but even my SUV couldn’t handle the rocky dirt roads. After hearing the bottom of the car scrape on one too many rocks on the narrow one lane road, I had to give up and turn around, so close to my goal.
After a couple days of photographing Valley of Fire State Park, I headed west. First I explored Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area, just to the west of Las Vegas. Even though it looked like a great location, I couldn’t get any spacesuit photos there. Since it was so close to Vegas, it was full of people, and there wasn’t a single path I could find close enough that I could carry all my equipment but far enough out that it didn’t have people all throughout it. So I just chalked it up to a nice hike / rest for my back & shoulders, and kept heading further west.
I reached Death Valley National Park on the California / Nevada border. My first stop in the part was at Dante’s View on the top of Mount Perry for sunset, which overlooks Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America. It was one of the few times that I was in my spacesuit for a prolonged period near strangers. I wanted to get several photos from the same angle as the sunlight changed, so I just stayed in the suit while waiting for the sun to set. Got several strange looks from folks, including one group that asked for a photo with me.
I got so much bang for my buck photographing in Death Valley. It’s a playground of diverse desert landscapes. The photo above was taken in Devil’s Golf Course, a minefield of rock hard and razor sharp salt deposits. There were numerous signs warning you to walk very carefully over the salt, because one fall could easily result in broken bones and cuts. So not exactly the safest terrain to transverse when you’re walking back & forth without really looking while taking self portraits ina spacesuit you can’t see that great out of and can’t really breath in while the visor’s down. Oh well, got the shot.
This photo was taken early one morning near Zabriski Point, a popular spot for landscape photography in Death Valley. In fact, it was so near the iconic Zabriski Point, that it’s just to the right of the edge of the frame. With the exception of Vasquez Rocks, I was trying to avoid from familiar photography landmarks for the series, to keep the landscapes looking unfamiliar. I’m sure that since I was so close to it though, that if anyone was getting a wide shot of Zabriski Point, they most likely got a little spaceman in the bottom corner of their image.
One of the luckiest moments of the shoot was sunset at Badwater Basin. It’s the lowest point in North America, and also the hottest on record. This year it reached 130 degrees. Yet oddly I’m not sure I ever felt cooler in the suit. The incredibly dry wind came so hard through the valley over the salt flats, and the suit itself is so breathable that despite it being 95 degrees that evening, I felt cool as a cucumber. I also got lucky with the perfect patch of clouds at sunset to give the photos all the best colors I was after with soft warm lighting too. The only thing not ideal about the shoot was that just out of frame I was surrounded by other tourists. Fortunately we had all walked so far out from the parking lot that we were well past the typical tourists, and were basically all photographers trying to get our own shots devoid of people and respectful of where other people’s frames were.
Since temperatures in Death Valley stayed around 70-80 degrees at night, sleeping in my car wasn’t ideal. But fortunately with just a 40 minute drive to the top of Mount Perry, the elevation meant for much lower and more comfortable temperatures (and the one spot of cell signal in the whole park). So each night I would drive back up the mountain to recharge and rest. But also being so far away from the rest of the park meant I’d have to wake up extra early in order to get to my first shoot location each morning.
This photo was taken at Artist’s Palette, a geological wonder with a dense variety of different kinds of dirt and mineral deposits, which results in a richly colorful landscape. Since it’s such a small area, and a popular attraction in the park, I had a fair number of onlookers while in my spacesuit, and not all of them noticed the camera. One person even joked he thought he was hallucinating.
I attempted to visit the northern half of the park, but the main road was shut down, and after I took the 3-hour detour that Google Maps recommended, I discovered once again that it was trying to send me down a rocky dirt road on someone’s private property that went up and over the mountain. So unfortunately there was no way for me to get to Ubehebe Crater, Eureka Dunes, or Grandstand (at least not without taking a 6 hour detour going completely around the entire park, but even then I had no way of knowing whether I’d end up on another road I couldn’t drive down).
Instead I returned to Vegas and tried to come up with another plan. I found a couple promising locations, such as Cathedral Gorge State Park, and Great Basin National Park, but it looked like by the time I would arrive, it would be raining for days. Instead I spent the day walking up and down the Vegas Strip until I got a phone call from a producer about a job in Houston they wanted to fly me out for, so I flew straight there, spacesuit and all, ending my second to last trip for the series.
