Interesting Photo of the Day: Sea of Purple in Utah’s Badlands

Interesting Photos

The image you see below was a project that took photographer, Guy Tal, five years to complete. Tal first witnessed the purple blooms while visiting Utah’s Badlands with a group of friends in early 2005. With no time to wait around for the perfect lighting conditions, Tal vowed to come back to the area to capture the gorgeous landscape properly. What he was unaware of at the time is that the scorpionweed bloom occurs once every five years if the conditions just so happen to be perfect:

The bloom found in this region of the Badlands generally occurs only once every five or more years (imgur)

After two more fruitless trips to the area in 2007 and 2008, despite finding nothing but a vacant stretch of land where the purple blossoms once captured his eye, Tal began to fall in love the area–even going so far as purchasing a home nearby.

Then, in 2010, it finally happened. Tal made his now yearly trek to the area to discover the flowers sprouting from the ground in full bloom. Blessed with a dramatic sky caused by a distant thunderstorm, Tal quickly set up his Canon 5D Mark II outfitted with a 17-40mm lens and began documenting the extremely rare occasion. Over the course of the following two weeks, he watched as the blooms turned from the vibrant violet to various shades of yellow before they, once again, vanished into the barren ground as quickly as they had appeared.