Boulder and Small Tree. Yosemite National Park, California. September 18, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A small tree grows from the side of a boulder near the shoreline of a subalpine back-country lake in Yosemite National Park.

This little tree seems like an impossibility. In a tiny crack in a very large boulder, some distance from the shore in this subalpine lake, it somehow manages to live and seemingly even thrive. It is hard to imagine a more difficult place for a tree to grow. It is also difficult, though interesting, to imagine what this tree might look like if it manages to succeed in the long-term and live for perhaps a hundred years or more. Will it get to the point that its roots begin to grow out of the small crack and spread across more of the rock, and might it form a small pocket of soil that supports other smaller plants?

I made the photograph in the morning, when the light of the early sun was just coming over a ridge above and to the right of the tree. It slanted across the top of the boulder and picked off the upper portion of the tree, leaving its lower truck and the face of the boulder in shade.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.