The first shot I came across on location, happened to be the entrance to the canyon itself. I needed to visit the place to be certain. I thought I might be on to something, but I needed more. Within minutes I had noticed a few other images that appeared to match up with shots from STAR WARS, though at the time none were tagged as such. I noticed that the shot was taken in Golden Canyon, so I modified my search to specify Golden Canyon. It looked like the profile of a face and I recognized it from the STAR WARS screen captures I had more or less memorized by this point. It wasn't captioned or otherwise tagged as a STAR WARS location, but I was drawn to the profile of the rock on the left of the frame. As I was scrolling through the search results, this photo by a user named Paul Heaston caught my eye.

Over the next few years, I continued to research this online. Though I did run across a few trip reports from STAR WARS fans who had visited Death Valley, the only shots I ever saw from this particular sequence in the film, where the three main shots from Artist's Palette: 1) the shot of R2-D2 entering the canyon ( the first shot of the sequence), 2) the shot of R2 rolling away from camera inside the canyon, and 3) the shot of the Jawas carrying R2 to the sandcrawler.Ī breakthrough came in mid-2006 when I was looking at Death Valley photos on flickr. I figured that the other shots I didn't see in Tunisia might be there as well. A few months later, I came to find out that at least a couple of shots from this sequence were filmed in Death Valley at Artist's Palette. In October 2000, when I was in Tunisia hunting for STAR WARS locations, there were a number of shots of Jawas watching R2-D2 as he moved through the canyon that I simply couldn't find.

Jawas star wars