This remote corner of the Mojave Desert, an overlooked jewel of badlands every bit as intriguing as in some of the better known and exponentially more crowded national parks, has become one of my most favorite places ever to go and shoot. And the area, being located nowhere near any major dwellings, has some of the clearest night skies around, making it a 2, at worst a 3, on the Bortles Scale light pollution/clear skies chart (1=perfectly clear night skies, no light pollution; 9=Inner City).
And the geology here, at least to my searching mind, has shapes and features in almost every rock that I don’t have to look at too long or hard to see faces emerge, static sentinels with facial structure, human or otherwise, staring off into the night sky. Here, on the top of the rock, emerges to me as some type of lizard, eyes, nose, and mouth clearly peering out atop the perch or throne it rests on.
I wonder when this face in the earth appeared, being that this spot is obviously always eroding away, slowly but surely. The face probably didn’t exist like this 500 years ago; it might be gone tomorrow. I wonder if anyone else had seen it before me, this seemingly cognizant feature existing for a brief sliver of geologic time and in the briefest window of space/time made all the more intriguing under the Milky Way’s ancient but also present light.