Spring Trip 2019 – Part 1 – Monahans Sandhills State Park, Texas

I finally got time to get away for a couple of weeks in March.  My destinations were largely determined by weather patterns and the distance between those possible destinations.  The first stop was Monahans Sandhills State Park between Odessa and Monahans, Texas.  This is a place that I first visited briefly in the 1980s, while on a business trip in the area.

I arrive at the Sandhills about mid-afternoon on a Saturday, where I had reservations in the RV camping area for two nights.  My campsite turned out to be in an advantageous site, adjacent to a dune that helped block the prevailing winds.  It had been very windy here just a few days prior, which is good, since the wind erases the surface disturbances created by visitors to the dunes.  However, I was there during a weekend, so I expected to have to work around the weekend visitors and their tracks in the sand dunes.

The park was fairly busy, as I expected, but the nightly winds helped mute the daily human disturbance of the sand dune surfaces.  Initially, I was not impressed by the photographic possibilities in the dunes and many of my photos lived up to those low expectations.  However, in the end I think I managed to get a few descent photos.  I will let the readers judge the results for themselves and maybe provide some feedback on the posted photos.

It was rather cloudy, especially the first day at sunset, so the late day light was intermittent and not as good as one would have liked for landscape photography. The clouds added drama to the sky, but I never got the brilliantly lit or colorful clouds that I had looked forward to.

It was a bit of a challenge to find large areas of undisturbed sand, but as you can see in the above photo, I managed to find a few such areas.  Although, there are muted footprints in the sand in the upper left side of the photo.  In the previous photo, there are muted footprints evident in the right portion of the photo.  I do not think these are so strongly apparent as to distract from the natural appearance of the sand.

The two trees in this photo are weather beaten and scraggly, but I like the glow in the sand at their base and the alternating dark to light in the sand ripples leading from the base of the photo to the trees.  This originally started out as a wider landscape view, but there were distracting elements on the right hand side, so I cropped the photo to remove the distraction.

This sunset photo was taken at the end of my first day in the sandhills.  There are notable human infrastructure item along the horizon, some of which I removed or muted via editing, but I could never get all of those features removed without leaving unattractive artifacts, so I left most of them in the photo.  These are only visible and distracting, when one enlarges the photo.

This is enough for this post.  I will continue with more photos from the sandhills in the next post.

Ken