I am hoping that someone can help me. I'm going to Death Valley again in September and I'd like to visit the Dunes near Stovepipe Wells. I've seen a few shots where there is an area of dried cracked mud in the foreground and I was wondering how far into the dunes these areas are? Could anyone give me an idea of how to find them?
Due to my husband being a wheelchair user, I can't go wandering off for long, so I am hoping that I'll be able to reach them fairly easily.
If you park in the parking lot for the dunes and walk out through the sand to the dunes, you will have to try really really hard to not see or walk through the "cracked mud."
However finding a composition that you like that features the cracked mud is equally as difficult as it presents itself in many different ways. You could easily spend as long walking around all of the valleys with cracked mud as you do getting there and back combined.
Between the dunes themselves and the parking lot is "scrub", small dunes and shallow valleys. In each valley you'll find the cracked mud.
The kicker is that you make much better progress walking on it (the cracked mud) than the sand.