Dense Brush, Morning Light. Pinnacles National Park, California. March 17, 2017. © Copyright 2017 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Morning light falls on dense brush at Pinnacles National Park
Today’s photograph is another from my recent re-introduction to Pinnacles National Park in the mountains to the east of California’s Salinas Valley, following a gap of decades since my last visit. Despite being a place that I regularly visited when I was much younger — back then I rode a bike there to camp, went there to rock climb, hiked the trails and caves — it had somehow slipped off my map of places to visit. For the past few years, since its conversion from National Monument to National Park status, I’ve been planning to finally return.
If your experience with National Parks is mainly with the big, iconic parks such as Yosemite or Yellowstone, this park is going to surprise you with its intimacy. It is a relatively small place, and even its primary visual feature, the High Peaks, doesn’t present a single, focused identifying image in the way that, say, Half Dome or Old Faithful do. It seems more the sort of park that is about subtle and small things and the overall experience of the place — mostly California chaparral terrain that can evoke a sense of near desert at times. I made this photograph earlier in the morning when I paused along a route through a canyon when I came upon dense, back-lit foliage.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. His book, “California’s Fall Color: A Photographer’s Guide to Autumn in the Sierra” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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