Into the Land of Diminished Return

wfeller

hawkeye978

Interesting shot. What is that corrugation from???

CWSkopec

Very cool shot, Walter!

Looks like dried mud and...? I can't even come up with an idea I like for what the corrugation might be...

Awais Yaqub

Interesting photo !

Seefutlung

Very interesting shot ... seems a tad on the blue side ... hard to say as I wasn't there. At first I thought the mud ran across the remains of some steps ... really dunno ...

Gary

jeffmeyers

Pretty cool. Almost looks like steps. Some sort of phosphate deposit?

wfeller

Thank you all. This shot took some work, and yet I have to do it again. The corrogation is from old railroad ties rotting in the soda and salts on the playa. Back 100 years or so ago, there was a salt recovery operation that used a narrow guage railroad to haul scrapped material in for processing. During WWII the rails were salvaged. 20 years later the ties were used for firewood. All the ties have disappeared for the first two miles (until a point of diminished return was reached- where it wasn't worth the trip to get the firewood) of the old track and the old road is nowhere to be found unless one wanders out into the void to find them. I started about an hour before sunrise and found them about 20 minutes after the sun came up. It took nearly an hour to walk back. I'll be out there again in a couple weeks to do it again with the long shadows.

The nearly pure white salts in the area tend to reflect the blue in the sky in twilight and while the sun is low.

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Seefutlung

And where is this playa?

Gary

wfeller

Seefutlung wrote:

And where is this playa?

Gary

The Mojave Desert Gary, always the Mojave Desert