I’d been an infor­mal rock art enthu­si­ast for years when, in the early 1990s, I fell in with a group of rock art Cal­i­for­nia enthu­si­asts. I went on a num­ber of field trips with them, includ­ing one multi-day jaunt in the Bishop area vis­it­ing a lot of sites that, sadly, I can no longer remem­ber how to find. Some­where along the line I had seen a pho­to­graph of this extra­or­di­nary panel, and it had been a goal of mine for years to see it in the flesh. By the end of the Bishop excur­sion, I was deemed trust­wor­thy by those in the know and was ver­bally given top-secret direc­tions. I fol­lowed the direc­tions, but failed to find the site (I now know the route is quite dif­fi­cult to describe and that I was way off track).

Fast for­ward to 2009. I dis­cov­ered a pho­tog­ra­pher friend had pho­tographed this panel years before, and he gra­ciously gave me another set of ver­bal direc­tions. Long story short, the direc­tions failed me again, but an acci­den­tal encounter with a pair of young Ger­man climbers in the wrong place led the climbers and me, even­tu­ally, to the right place. We spent hours there, many of them in the dark, until we got too cold to stay any longer. I was so excited to have found the panel that I made every rookie photographer’s mis­take in the book and, as they say, came home with only mem­o­ries, and no usable images.

A year later, I was again in the Bishop area en route to Lone Pine, and I made a point of revis­it­ing the site for another attempt at a night shot. For­tu­nately, I kept my head this time and made sig­nif­i­cantly fewer mis­takes. But let me just say that spend­ing part of a night alone at a rock art site this beau­ti­ful and this iso­lated is a pow­er­ful, and some­times dis­qui­et­ing, expe­ri­ence. One that is per­haps bet­ter shared with a friend. In the weeks and months ahead, I will be adding more images like these to my night land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy gallery.

Tech­ni­cal Data:
Body: Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Lens: Canon EF 17-40mm f/4 L USM at 17mm
Expo­sure: ISO 100, f/5.6, 4860 sec­onds over 18 exposures