Trona Pinnacles Sunset: Fire In the Sky

(But no water for there to be smoke on).

I shot this at the Trona Pinnacles the night before (July 18, 2017) the sunset time-lapse and panorama I recently posted.

This panorama was stitched together from 15 vertical frames shot with my Canon 6D and Tokina AT-X 17-35mm at 1-20 sec f-8 ISO 100 at 35mm.

The Trona Pinnacles are an unusual geological feature in the California Desert National Conservation Area. The unusual landscape consists of more than 500 tufa spires (porous rock formed as a deposit when springs interact with other bodies of water), some as high as 140 feet (43 m), rising from the bed of the Searles Lake (dry) basin. The pinnacles vary in size and shape from short and squat to tall and thin, and are composed primarily of calcium carbonate (tufa). They now sit isolated and slowly crumbling away near the south end of the valley, surrounded by many square miles of flat, dried mud and with stark mountain ranges at either side.

The Pinnacles are recognizable in more than a dozen hit movies. Over thirty film projects a year are shot among the tufa pinnacles, including backdrops for car commercials and sci-fi movies and television series such as Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Disney's Dinosaur, The Gate II, Lost in Space, and Planet of the Apes.
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