Subalpine Lake and Pinnacles, Afternoon. Kings Canyon National Park, California. July 30, 2010. © Copyright 2010 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Afternoon clouds and light above an eastern Sierra subalpine lake and pinnacles
I am continuing my late 2014 nostalgic return visit to photographs from a 2010 backpack trip into the southern Sierra Nevada with a group of friends, a visit that took us over three very high passes (one over 13,000′) and into some quite remote areas of the Sierra Nevada in Sequoia National Park. For some reason I had sort a number of the photographs behind, sequestered away in raw files where I had not looked at them since that trip. I have some theories about how this came about — I won’t bore readers with all of them, but I do know that sometimes we aren’t quite ready to see photographs for what they really are until some time has passed.
We began our trip at the high Onion Valley trailhead in the eastern Sierra, crossing a familiar first-day pass over the crest and then descending to this beautiful subalpine valley, where short trees grow around rocky lakes that are bordered by a line of rugged and rocky pinnacles that extend back toward the crest. This is a place I have passed through quite often over the years, and since many of the visits were on the first or last day of much longer trips, I think that I may have missed some of the area’s beauty while focused on where I was going next. This time we arrived fairly early on a beautiful afternoon with broken clouds — the kind that suggest the possibility of thunder but then don’t produce it — and the light only became more beautiful as afternoon wore on toward evening.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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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