North Lake, Piute Crags. Sierra Nevada, California. October 7, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.

I had started this early October morning by photographing the first light at Sabrina Lake. After I finished up there – still quite early – I decided to head on over to North Lake, even though I was pretty certain that I had missed the best aspen color display this year. (North Lake is renowned for a “tree tunnel” as you arrive at the lake and for a huge aspen grove that rises up a gully on the far side of the lake.)

Sure enough, almost all the aspens had lost their leaves, and the few remaining were almost all brown and black. So I turned to a different landscape subject – snow-dusted Piute Crags with the shoreline of North Lake in the foreground.