Death Valley - Texas Springs

Monday morning and afternoon, 5 of the 6 students went with one instructor back to the classroom while the other instructor contacted the Park Rangers and started the search for our missing classmate at Zabriskie Point.

(Since the latest blog, when posted, goes at the top, you may want to start at the last blog on Death Valley and work your way up to the present.)

We spent the afternoon working on our pictures and doing critiques of each other's work.  However, in the back of all of our minds was our lost classmate.

We received several requests for information:
How tall was he?
What was he wearing?
What kind of shoes did he have on?
What did he have with him?  Water?  Photographic equipment?

Those questions were meant to give the searchers additional information, but they trigger thoughts in our minds:
Had they found a body?
Had they found someone who was unconscious?
Why did they want to know about his shoes?  (They wanted to know about his shoes so that they could know what his footprint looked like.  A recommendation that we heard later was that if you are going hiking in the back country, you should take a picture of your shoes and the print that they leave and text it to someone who can share it with searchers if needed.)

So our work went a little slower and we stayed at the classroom a little longer so that we could hear any news.

Finally, at 2:30 or so we heard good news.  He had been found.  He was uninjured!  Yippee!

So we finished up what we were working on and headed to the Texas Springs Campground for our sunset shoot for the evening.

Unfortunately, we got there a little too late.  The sun was already below the horizon.  So we did not get any shots with strong, warm, slanting sunlight.

But we stayed long enough to get some night time star shots, like the one below: