Heading back out to Valley of Fire for a second time last week, I was able to capture some shots of lambs this time. Rather than setting out to find sheep, I was there to hike over some of the sandstone mounds that are in the White Dome area. But regardless, I always have a camera on me and I brought the a7s and a 100-400mm as well as a 50mm and on the way back to the car, we came across a herd on a striped rock cliff. We had been out for about 6 hours at that point and the sun was setting, so the light wasn’t the best for shooting and getting color in the shadows with the dynamics between the sunlit rocks and the rocks in the shade. Still, there were plenty of great photos that came out of a 20 minutes period of us being in their presence.
The featured photo for this article has two lambs jostling with each other up on a cliff of a sandstone mountain with another one poking it’s head out from behind one of the jostling two. They were pretty comfortable with us at a distance to go about their activities, which in this case was just soaking up the last of the sun as is set. There wasn’t too much brush in the area that they were in, so we didn’t see their constant chewing that normally goes on. After a little bit, the matriarch ewe rounded the herd together and headed up an adjacent cliff and passed us to the southwest as we were headed in the opposite direction back to the car.
This little interaction again, gives me a greater appreciation for a park that is really close to Vegas and gets plenty of untitled publicity in commercials and the background for science fiction movies. But yet there is nothing that documents what goes on in this little red and white gem an hour north of town.