From the floor of Badwater Basin, I look to the east and see the colors over the mountains changing from a grey-blue to a familiar orange I've seen thousands of times. No matter how hard it is getting out of bed sometimes, I've never regretted watching the sun come up. With guests flanking to the left, we all make small talk in the semi-darkness while tripods creak and clunk into place.
Way up on the mountain to the east, I can make out a small rectangle of white - it's a sign. While the sign is too far away to read, I know what it says: sea level.
When I was a kid, my family had a set of World Book Encyclopedias. Minted in 1971, the books sat on an oak-stained shelf in my bedroom. Wrapped in textured red covers with black and gold embellishments, the pages were well-used. These books were my version of the internet WAY before there was an internet. Â
I tell that story because, standing at the bottom of Badwater Basin (some 282 feet below sea level), I instantly recalled seeing this place in my encyclopedias when I was a kid. It's one of those full-circle moments of which I am so fond.
We've strolled about a mile onto the salt flat to get to this spot. The walking is easy because the salt is hard, and the topography is as flat as I've ever experienced in nature. Â
"I wonder how thick the salt is?" asks one of the guests attending this nature photography workshop. I'm speechless because it's something I've never considered. All the water is gone in this broad, endorheic basin that was once an ancient lake, but the salt remains.  Over the eons, tectonic uplift created a rise of mountains that flank the basin. As the mountains rose, the basin sunk, and now all of the water that flows into Death Valley stays and doesn't flow out. It simply sits at the bottom of the ancient lake and is evaporated by the intense heat for which this park is known.
The mountains' peaks rise to over 11,000 feet on the west side. This high, westerly mountain ridge chokes the rainfall from the valley. As such, the entire national park only averages 2.5 inches of rainfall per year, and some spots in the park receive no rain at all.
From where we stand at the lowest point in North America (-282 feet), it's only ten miles or so to Telescope Peak (11,043 above sea level), which is the most extreme geographic change in the shortest distance you'll find in the lower 48 states. Where we stand to photograph, odd geometric shapes of salt jut from the basin's floor. We stop and photograph, and we are in complete solitude for a while.
That's the appeal of Death Valley. Although over a million visitors come here yearly, the park is so big that it's not hard to be alone.
We spend the week exploring a desert so dry, that cacti don't even do well here. Upon first glance in the park, you may think there's not much here. In the heart of the explorer (and the photographer) is the ability to uncover places of beauty even when it's not apparent.
So we do just that.
We walk amongst immense sand dunes that shape-shift each time the wind blows. We visit an immense crater that formed when magma flash-boiled a pocket of subterranean water and caused an immense explosion. The park contains textures and sparse landscapes showing few signs of human settlement. However, the area is pocked with mines where protectors come here to extract borates, gold, and other minerals. None of the minerals were in high enough concentration to commercialize, so the rush was short-lived. One ghost town grew from nothing to 10,000 people and back to nothing in about five years. Â
Settlement here is as ephemeral as the rain.
