Photographing The White Desert, Egypt

A Park You Can't Just Drive Into

The White Desert isn't somewhere you can simply show up to. It's a protected area patrolled by the Egyptian authorities, and getting in means going through the proper channels rather than just following a map. The trip starts with about four hours by car out of Cairo, and that's only the first leg — at a certain point you switch into a different kind of vehicle entirely, one built for the terrain, with local guides who actually know the ground, for another hour before the desert itself opens up in front of you.

Not Enough Time For How Much There Is

Nothing prepares you for the actual scale of the place, or the sheer variety of shapes the rock has taken. I had one day. That's not enough — I'd guess a week wouldn't be enough to properly cover it. The desert doesn't hold the light for long either; it gets dark faster out there than you'd expect, which meant working fast and not wasting a single hour. The one thing that saved the day was planning ahead of time: before the light got serious, we drove the area first so I could point out to my guide exactly which formations I wanted for sunset and which for sunrise, rather than trying to figure that out in the moment with the clock already running.

Sleeping On The Sand

Once the sun was down, we made camp right there in the desert. The guides put together dinner and tea while the sky did the rest of the work — we slept directly on the sand, out in the open, no tent between us and the sky. I've genuinely never seen the stars sit that low anywhere else; it felt like you could reach up and take one. I was up again before sunrise to get back to the spots we'd scouted the day before and catch the formations in that first light, before the heat and the crowds change everything about how the place looks.

An Ancient Sea, Carved By Wind

The chalk and limestone that make up the White Desert were laid down as sediment on the floor of an ancient sea during the Cretaceous period, tens of millions of years before any of the shapes that make the place famous existed. What eventually surfaced was a soft, pale rock that wind and windblown sand have spent millennia carving into towers, columns, and the mushroom-like formations the area is best known for — each one shaped by the same slow erosion, no two quite alike. The area was formally protected as a national park in 2002, which is part of why access is controlled the way it is today.

See this location in the White Desert & Sahara collection. Every print is made to order and personally signed, on archival Fujiflex paper or as a Lumachrome TruLife acrylic face-mount, starting at $900. For more on materials, sizing, and how prints are made, see the collector's guide.