Forest Meets Meadow, Morning. Yosemite National Park, California. August 15, 2017. © Copyright 2017 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Forest trees at the edge of Tuolumne Meadow, morning
We made a very brief mid-August visit to Tuolumne Meadows recently, mainly as a sort of shake-down cruise to test equipment for another upcoming trip — but also, of course, “because Tuolumne!” The equipment testing went just fine, though other aspects of the trip were less perfect. Mostly, there was the wildfire smoke, which was about as thick as I’ve ever experienced up there on our first day. It was so thick that we actually got in the car and headed over the crest and out of the park to try to escape it, not really getting out of the pall until we went all the way to Mammoth Lakes! It was still very smokey when we returned to camp in Tuolumne and when we went to bed that night.
I woke up early the next day and peeked outside. I didn’t see more than a slight bit of leftover smoke, so I got up fairly quickly and wandered down to the meadow to see what I could see, arriving there with my equipment before the first light came over the Sierra crest. As is so often the case there, despite being one of many hundreds of people camping at Tuolumne, I was alone for a full hour just a few hundred feet from the campground as I wandered and photographed in the meadow. This photograph shows the familiar boundary between forest and meadow. In the foreground and to the left the land is lower in areas that flood during the spring runoff and are still marshy even now. To the right are trees, growing on the slightly higher rocky terrain that dries out sooner and which provides a better footing for these trees.
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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