The furthest and emptiest of these days, and the only one where the road itself is one of the subjects. In April 1986 David Hockney spent a week at a desert crossroads making a photocollage out of it. The junction is still there, still unremarkable, and still exactly the thing he saw.
Three stops across ninety miles of high desert, and the through-line is the horizontal — a fault that stood the ground on end, a road that runs dead flat to a vanishing point, and a field where aircraft are parked in rows because there is simply nowhere else that big and that dry.
And under it, one rhythm: vertical → horizontal → repeated. Ground stood on end, then a road laid dead flat, then the same shape parked forty times in a row.
Punchbowl at opening. Work the junction past the first good frame. Respect the flightline.
Teaches · Exhaust One — after Joel Meyerowitz · David Hockney
Open the whole day in Google Maps ↗ — in order: Devil’s Punchbowl · 165th St East · Mojave. It routes from wherever the phone is, and every spot below links its own leg the same way.
Tap any point for the leg it belongs to. Three stops spread across ninety miles of high desert — about a hundred and ninety miles round, comfortably the biggest drive of any capsule here. The first two are seven miles apart; the third is a fifty-mile run north on its own.
Nothing today is a locked door — the constraint is distance and heat. Ninety miles out and ninety back through open desert, with the middle of the day spent in it. Go on a cool clear one and start early; in high summer this day is genuinely unpleasant and there is no shade at any of the three stops.
A day trip's unit is the leg, not the day — each carries a locator map, its theme, and an energy read. A gold pill on the clock means that time belongs to someone else: a door that opens or a slot that was booked. Everything unpilled is a suggested shape, not a schedule.
Ground stood on end, before the heat arrives.
North out of the basin, up through Santa Clarita and out into the Antelope Valley. The landscape changes twice on the way and the second change — over the pass into open desert — is abrupt.
Sandstone beds shoved from horizontal to nearly vertical by the San Andreas, standing out of flat scrub in a way that looks staged. Low morning light across them is what gives the bedding its texture — by midday it flattens badly. The frame is the angle: get low, let one slab run diagonally out of a corner, and keep the sky to a minimum so the tilt has nothing level to be measured against.
The flattest subject in these capsules, and the most deliberate.
Off the ridge and down onto the valley floor. The junction with 165th Street East is unremarkable in every direction, which is the entire point of it.
Hockney spent a week here in April 1986 photographing a junction from dozens of positions and assembling it into one image at the Getty. The instruction is his: shoot the same nothing from many angles rather than hunting one good frame. The road running to a vanishing point, the stop sign, the litter in the scrub, the signage — all given equal weight. It is the second capsule here to ask for a method rather than a picture, and like the Baltz one it is harder than it sounds.
The furthest point of any of these days, and the one with a hard restriction on it.
Fifty miles of open desert with almost nothing on it. Eat when you arrive; there is no reason to do this stretch hungry and nothing between here and there.
Half an hour on a 250 kW stall while the light is at its worst, one mile from the stop you came for. The arithmetic is not close: 210 miles driven, but 4,600 ft of climb to Devil’s Punchbowl makes it 240 miles consumed against 220 of range. There are four Superchargers within two miles of the airport and none at all between here and the Punchbowl, so this is both the only place to do it and the cheapest.
Airliners parked in rows in the desert because it is dry enough here that they do not rot. It is a working airport, not an attraction, and the photography rule is real: nothing on the flightline side, and the boneyard proper needs the operator's written approval. What you can shoot is the public side, the perimeter and whatever the ramp is showing. Go with that expectation, obey the posted signs, and the frame is repetition — the same tail shape stacked away from you until it stops being aircraft and becomes pattern.
The longest drive home of the seven capsules, and the reason this day starts at half six. Set off by five and it is a straight run; leave much later and the last stretch through the valley is slow.
Three anchors and a lot of road. One has real vertical in it, one is a flat two-lane, and the third has a photography rule you need to know in advance. Tap a spot’s map for driving directions.
Every leg below carries the same day at two speeds. Dawn is the early, light-driven version; Slow starts late, drops a stop and keeps the good one. Steady is the shape written above. None of them is the failure case — pick on the morning, from how the day actually feels.
The geotag gets each frame close to where it stood — close, not exact; the last hundred yards are always a hunt. What a machine can't do is the part below: which ones survived, and whether the day was worth the drive.
The frame of the day.
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Could you actually work Hockney's way, or did you hunt one frame?
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Was Mojave worth the extra hundred miles?
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What the light did at the Punchbowl, versus the plan.
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Vertical, horizontal, repeated — did that hold up across ninety miles?
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Which hour was actually the best one?
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Would you do this one again in winter?
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Where next — and closer to home, or further out?
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