Aspen Covered Hills. Cedar Breaks National Monument, Utah. October 5, 2012. © Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Aspens, some golden and some bare, cover high elevation slopes near Brian Head, Utah
The distant trees are likely along the border of Cedar Breaks National Monument, although the foreground trees are outside of the monument and actually along the boundary of Brian Head, Utah. While exploring some gravel roads the day before I had driven up a side road that turned out to be the route to the 11,000+” summit of Brian Head Peak. While I was up there taking in the 360-degree panorama, I had looked down to get a different perspective on the area along the ridge above Brian Head and, for the first time, I saw whole hillsides covered with aspens that I had not been able to see from the main roads through town. After descending from the mountain I figured out how to get to this aspen area and I ended up shooting there a couple of times over the next two days.
The shooting position was a very short walk from my car after I drove a short dirt side-road. From here there were open views to the west where large aspen groves seemed to trail off into the distance, beginning with groves that were very close by. Looking down from this high spot, I had an interesting perspective on the lower forests, a mixture of coniferous trees and very tall and straight aspens that seemed to be the tallest trees. I had not seen a forest like this before, where the two types of trees were so intermixed. By this time most of the aspens at this elevation had lost their leaves, revealing their skeletal vertical trunks among the other trees, though there were a few spots of color remaining here and there.
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.