Category Archives: Locations

Commentary, Locations

Almost Time for Eastern Sierra Aspen Color

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Aspen Thicket, Bishop Creek - Bright yellow autumn leaves festoon a dense aspen thicket along Bishop Creek near South Lake, California.
Aspen Thicket, Bishop Creek – Bright yellow autumn leaves festoon a dense aspen thicket along Bishop Creek near South Lake, California.

Earlier today I posted my first photos of fall color from the 2012 season, so it seems like a good time to re-share my overview of photographing the Eastern Sierra aspen color, “Sierra Nevada Fall Color – Coming Sooner Than You Think!” The article gives a general outline of where you might look for aspen color in areas from about Carson Pass south to just below Bishop, and also goes into some ideas, both technical and aesthetic, about how you might photograph this subject. I first posted the article three years ago, and I’ve updated it each year since then.

The “coming sooner than you think” part of the article’s title seems especially appropriate this year. Although one can never be absolutely certain how the color change will play out or when it will start and end, there are signs that things may be a bit different this year. The main thing is that some color seems to have appeared a bit earlier than usual. I found some interesting color (though distinctly short of peak color) on a three-day backpacking trip into McGee Canyon on September 14-16 this year – and that seems significantly earlier than I normally expect. I have also heard some second- and third-hand reports of a bit of interesting color already developing in a few other aspen areas.

(9/25/12 update: Various sources who have been in the Sierra since I wrote the original post or who are there now are generally reporting that the color transition has indeed begun a bit ahead of schedule this season. While the progress of aspen color can never be precisely predicted, I’d plan on erring on the side of arriving a bit early this year – in fact, that’s precisely what I plan to do!)

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer 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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Ideas, Locations, Stories

I Feel Fall Coming

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It happens every year at about this time, close to the middle of August. Even though I have learned to expect it, I’m still happily surprised when it occurs. There is inevitably a day when I am outside and I sense something different in the world and I know (really know, not just know by looking at the calendar) that the seasonal trajectory is now beginning to leave summer behind and head inevitably toward autumn.

This is not a bad thing, by the way. I happen to love autumn.

Dry Creek at Fletcher Lake - A dry creek surrounded by golden autumn meadow grasses and illuminated by early morning light winds through a clump of small trees near Fletcher Lake, Yosemite National Park, California.
A dry creek surrounded by golden autumn meadow grasses and illuminated by early morning light winds through a clump of small trees near Fletcher Lake, Yosemite National Park, California.

It often happens for me in the Sierra. I usually spend weeks there between June and October – the time of year when camping and backpacking are possible. The beginning of the season is marked by tremendous changes. Snow melts, rivers rise, meadows flood, plants emerge, flowers bloom, campgrounds open, trails clear, tourists arrive, plans are made and executed and many things are new, or at least new once again. Then on that August day, something changes. I cannot put my finger precisely on the nature of the change, but it is unmistakable and it often stops me momentarily in my tracks when it happens. For some reason I often associate it with the way the air seems to move and with the way it carries sound – I may notice something different in the sound of the breeze or the way it amplifies the sound of a cascade across a valley. There is something about the light that I think of as a kind of soft quality and a feeling that the color of the light might be a bit cooler. At about the same time I often notice certain other more concrete indications for the first time, too, such as the way that more of the corn lily plants start to become brown or even yellow and that grasses are less and less green and more and more brown.

I was not in the Sierra when it happened this year. This year, the past few months have not been a time for a lot of travel to places like the Sierra. I have only been to the Sierra on a single multi-day visit, and that was over a month ago. (Don’t worry – I will be going back soon!) So this year it happened at home, on a morning earlier this week – my birthday, actually – when I walked into our yard in the morning to take a look at the vegetable garden, and I notice that vague but unmistakable quality of light, quietness of the breeze, and softness of the atmosphere.

The calendar may say summer, and for more than a month to come, but I’m ready for autumn.

© Copyright 2012 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him.

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Commentary, Locations, Site News

What Happened to My Death Valley Guide?

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During the past year or two I had written the majority of an extensive guide to photographing in Death Valley National Park and some of the surrounding areas, and shared it at this web site. It was chock-full of the names of places and descriptions of how to get to them and specific suggestions regarding how they might be photographed – along with a few disclaimers and warnings about dangers including focusing too much on bagging photographs of icons, endangering certain fragile things in the park, and so forth.

I recently took this guide down, with the intention of writing a new one that I hope will be more useful to those who are looking for a bit of a deeper understanding of the place and how it might be photographed, perhaps at the expense of providing that quick list of where to go and how to get there.

Every so often friends remind me that there are ethical risks in sharing too much detailed information in the wrong forums, and recently one friend mentioned this relative to a post about a particular area I had photographed that is easily accessible but not yet overrun. As result I began the process of going through some previous posts and editing descriptions to offer details only when it seemed important in the context of the photograph. Then I started thinking a bit more about the content of the my existing guide to photographing the park. Even though I had worked to “sanitize” the descriptions in the old guide – removing many of the references to exact spots and so forth – and of including exhortations to protect the place, I began to think that I was not necessarily doing photographers a big favor by offering a guide that was primarily organized along the lines of “places to go,” and which might encourage people to go “bag a shot” of these places rather than looking a bit deeper.

Some may ask, “Why not tell people the best places?”

  • Plenty of other people have already written guides to the places. In the end, I probably don’t really have a lot to add to this pool of information. If you want to know the names of icons and where to find them you can certainly find this information elsewhere.
  • While many of us begin by thinking that the goal is to photograph the “famous places” – and, frankly, that is not a bad way to start – eventually I realized that it was the process of discovering my own orientation to the park that brought greater pleasure and rewards. I don’t want to encourage others to miss out on that experience.
  • Some of the places are wonderful largely because of their remoteness and solitude. In fact, the immense solitude of Death Valley is one of the most powerful and rare things it has to offer, and there are still many places and times to find this. I don’t want to accelerate the loss of this valuable commodity.
  • While many areas of the park might seem too rugged to be damaged much by our passage, there are fragile things here that cannot withstand the presence of too many people – and there are plenty of examples of things that have already been damaged. While it isn’t my goal to keep people away from the park, I certainly don’t want to accelerate the degradation of these resources by unnecessarily encouraging more people to go to these places.

So, I’m offering this post as both an explanation of where the old Death Valley guide went, and as a promise to get to work on the document that will replace it. My plan is to speak in more general terms about what it means to photograph in the park and about how to approach it as a photographic subject – and to do so in a way that may offer something useful to all who want to seek out the rewards that come from developing a deeper relationship with this land.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer 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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Text, photographs, and other media are © Copyright G Dan Mitchell (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Commentary, Locations

Aspen Update 10/17/11

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I’m back from my second trip to the eastern Sierra in as many weeks, and I’d like to share a bit of what I observed.

A week ago I visited and/or photographed several areas including Bishop Creek, Rock Creek, McGee Creek, a few areas around Mammoth Lakes, and Lee Vining Canyon. I also got reports from others who were there at the same time, and their reports tended to be in line with what I saw that week, namely that the trees that had been turning were interrupted by the early winter-like storm, dropping leaves or turning brown/black, and that lower elevation trees were mostly still green. At that time my hunch was that not much more was going to happen up high, but that the many green trees would provide color over the following couple of weeks.

This week I visited the portion of Bishop Creek in the South Lake drainage, areas on and near Glacier Lodge Road, the north section of the June Lakes loop near Parker Lake, Lee Vining Canyon, and Conway Summit. This visit confirmed some of my expectations from the previous week but also offered some surprises.

  • The thought that the loss of higher elevation leaves might mean that they were done for the season turned out to be not quite correct. This week I saw a surprising amount of color up high. In many places along the eastern escarpment I saw groves of brightly color trees marching right up many ridges.
  • Although I did not return to North Lake, I even heard reports that it had improved. (Though the person sharing the report pointed out that this would likely not be an exceptional year there.)
  • The color of the middle and lower level trees seems to be progressing very quickly. I was expecting middle elevation trees to turn by this week, but I was surprised by how low the color extended. If forced to make a prediction, I might guess that the season is going to run its course a bit faster than usual this year. (Stable weather this week – especially if the winds are light – might sustain things a bit longer.)

I feel like every aspen season has its own “personality” – whether it starts gradually or suddenly, early or a bit later, whether it is interrupted by weather events, and how long it lasts. The personality of this year’s eastern Sierra aspen season seems to include the storm that interrupted the early color up high, followed by a very rapid development of color about a week later.

I need to offer a few disclaimers. First, I only visited a small percentage of the places where aspen color may be found in a typical season. Second, while I can make some guesses about how things will evolve going forward, no one really knows. Third, if you are going to head out there to photograph the aspens this season, I urge you to check others sources of information on the conditions before you go.