Alpine Cascade. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
A boulder in the rushing cascade of an alpine stream, John Muir Wilderness.
The large scale (“monumental,” “symphonic,” etc) landscape is so impressive that it is easy to overlook smaller subjects in the wilderness. This is certainly true in the high regions of the Sierra Nevada, where the grand expression of the landscape predominates: great valleys, monumental peaks, immense sky, large stretches of forest. But years spent in all over the range finally taught me that the experience of the Sierra is at least as strongly composed of smaller things — the crunch of boots on the trail, cold pre-dawn air, texture of smooth granite, the sound of rushing water. (OK, the damned mosquitos, too. But let’s not go there!)
Those other things are the hardest to convey in a photograph, I think. (I still am not certain how to photographically convey the sonic experience…) On last summer’s weeklong visit to the high country of the John Muir Wilderness there was plenty of the big stuff to distract us at a first. We base-camped in a high elevation valley surrounded by high peaks that dominated out view. But nearby there were also meadows, and there was water flowing everywhere. I made this photograph of a small cascade only a few hundred feet from our camp.
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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