The Crossing. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A Sierra Nevada backcountry trail crosses the outlet stream of a subalpine lake.

I pondered whether or not this photograph should make it from raw file stage to finished work, but finally decided to go ahead and share it. It is a bit of a hard scene to make sense of, at least if you aren’t somewhat familiar with such places already — more on that in a moment. In the end, something about it “works” for me, so I’ve decided to go ahead and share.

The spot is perhaps no more special that thousands of similar places in the Sierra. But, in a way, that is what makes it special — such little intimate landscapes are everywhere and they form the identity of the range, more, I think, than impressive and iconic peaks. Once you get into the Sierra it is, fundamentally, an intimate landscape. You walk along narrow trails, though forests or meadows or rock fields, and cross streams, step around boulders, listen to the sound of your own footsteps and perhaps your trekking poles clattering on rock. Here the scene is from the season when everything slows down near the end of summer. This little spot was brilliantly green, with higher water and wildflowers only weeks earlier, but by this point in late September it has gone yellow and brown and winter snows are just around the corner.

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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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