Steelhead Lake, Morning. Eastern Sierra Nevada, California. September 15, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Morning light on shoreline trees at Shoreline Lake.
This photograph comes from my late-season three-day backpack trip up into McGee Canyon in the eastern Sierra. This has been a very unusual summer in various ways, so it was almost certainly also my only pack trip this season. (This is very unusual for me – I typically spend several weeks to as much as a month on the trail each summer.) I have visited the McGee Creek trailhead on a number of occasions, most often while searching for aspen color, but I had never hiked more than perhaps a quarter mile up the trail into the canyon. The three of us were rather lazy about planning. At various times leading up to the trip we had thought about heading up to the McGee Lake area, possibly crossing McGee Pass on the Sierra crest and various other ideas – but we hadn’t really settled on anything specific by the time we arrived at the trailhead.
More or less while loading up the packs, we decide that Steelhead Lake would be out likely objective. None of us had been there before, and I was pretty much completely unaware of the place or more than the general outline of the day’s hike. I had briefly looked at maps, but not in any detail. I understood that we would follow the main trail straight up the canyon and then follow its curve to the left as we climbed. I also knew that somewhere up there I would find a trail junction to Steelhead Lake and that it didn’t look like the like was very far beyond this junction. (Sometimes I like to intentionally avoid knowing too much about a place in advance, since this allows me to discover it on its own terms when I get there.) The first portion of the hike was much as I imagined, except that I was surprised to find that there were extensive aspen groves and that they were already changing colors. There was one bit of surprise when the junction to Steelhead Lake turned out to be further up the trail than expected. However, the biggest surprise – and not quite the happiest one – was that what looked like a short journey up this side trail to the lake turned out to be a very, very steep climb! In any case, the lake itself turned out to be a pretty little isolated place, being at more or less the end of a spur trail. It sits in a bowl that with steep slopes on two sides and, somewhat surprisingly for an “east side” location, while it gets decent evening light over the crest, it does not get very early morning light at all. I made this photograph shortly after that morning light had finally arrived and backlit some of the lakeside trees near out campsite.
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.