"Piercing thorns in flesh grown tough from blowing dust
Unquenchable thirst, endless yearning, engulfing silence, complete darkness
Has driven me to crave stronger flavors, brighter colors, bolder patterns
To cut through drifting dust
This lonely land, where the more you love someone the further you dance apart"
- By Charlotte Wachtel

These photos are from a 1999 trip to Death Valley with friends. In the first image we had stopped at a spring to look for pup fish and instead found crayfish. These are not native to the area, so we took it upon ourselves to try and catch them to make the spring safe again for the native species. Needless to say, we failed miserably in our quest to catch them, probably since we were using a paper cup, chopsticks, and a scarf as our net.

The second image is my friend Billy standing in the middle of Devil's Golf Course in sandals, a field of evaporates which are very sharp to the touch. Next is Badwater, the lowest point in the Northern Hemisphere. The fouth image is Ubehebe crater, one of my personal spots in Death Valley. I have climbed up and down this crater on every trip there and still find something new every time.

On the way home (which at that time was Oregon for me) on this particular trip, which was taken at the end of March, we ran into snow. Naturally a snowball fight broke out when we stopped for lunch. The fifth photo was taken just before I got hit dead on with a series of snowballs from every direction. You can actually see one of them in mid-flight in the photo.