What makes you think there will be settlements over there?

What is with all these Star Wars related titles anyway?  Well, gentle reader, many of the scenes on Tatooine (Luke Skywalker's home planet) were filmed here in Death Valley.  The dunes you are about to see are Stovepipe Dunes.  The desolate dunes C3-PO and R2-D2 are lost in after escaping from the captured Tantive IV are these very dunes.  They big'uns are about 1.5 miles from the road through loose desert sand. Once there, it took some hiking to find the shots I was looking for.  I don't know if you have hiked through this kind of sand before but it is exhausting.  It's hard to take a bad shot of these dunes if you show up for the sunrise (like I did).  After mid-morning the sun makes these (and any dunes) flat and bright.  But early morning and late in the afternoon, the contrast is great.  After the first shot of some bird footprints (most likely a Kildeer) there are just sundry shots of the dunes, including one featuring me.

Here is a little guy I found in the Visitors' Center parking lot.  Unfortunately he was pretty fearless, which means someone fed him.  So I got some good shots, but he'll probably be dead soon.  Wild animals that get fed by humans get used to seeing humans and then get sick from our food, hit by our cars, or become aggressive (in the case of feline and canis families) and are killed or put down.  So it was cool to see him, but overall, the story is bad.

These last shots are from Hell's Gate.  I went up at the end of the day to get some sidelighting of the valley hoping for some good color, but the haze in the valley defeated me.  Still you can see me again, and a shot looking down the southern end of the valley.