Category Archives: Photographs: Northern California

Photographs from Northern California

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Pond and Autumn Aspens, Evening

October 15, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A grove of autumn color aspens reflected in an eastern Sierra Nevada pond

I saved my visit to this place for the final evening of the final day of this year’s aspen hunt. Although I had passed by the mouth of this canyon four days earlier, while heading to another location near the start of my trip, I had only glanced in from the main highway — but I could tell, both from experience and from looking, that there would almost certainly be some good color here later on. Although the color change seemed to start on a rather early schedule this year, later on the pattern seemed to become closer to the norm. Color started high, and by the time I made this photograph a lot of the highest elevation color was going or gone. (Not all of it though — even amidst lots of bare trees up high, I still came across scattered high elevation groves full of color.)

As the color transition continues, it moves to successively lower elevations, and some of the most protected east-side canyons can hold color even longer. In the past this has often been a decent late season location for color, but I’ve also been there when the color came and went early, for reasons I could not decipher. So on this day when I actually entered the canyon for the first time this fall, I wondered if the colors that I could see along the stream where it emptied into larger valley below might be all there was… or if the color would continue up higher. It turned out that the colors did continue, and in outstanding form! The majority of the trees had fully or nearly fully changed color, with a few other trees at either end of the transition — some still all or mostly all green, and a few that had gone to bare trunks and branches. Far up the canyon there are flooded meadows, and I made this photograph at the highest of these ponds.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Green and Yellow Aspens

October 14, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A grove of green and yellow autumn aspen trees in the eastern Sierra Nevada

Since I just spent some days photographing autumn color in the Sierra Nevada, I’m going to interrupt the continuing series of early September Yosemite back-country photographs to share at least one of these recent autumn photographs. I began in the Tahoe area and this year I followed a path partly dictated by a fall color project that I’m working on, heading south through Hope Valley, then over Monitor Pass and continuing on the Bishop Creek area for a day of shooting before working my way back up into areas roughly around the intersection of routes 120 and 395 near Lee Vining.

As much as we all have “our places” to look for aspens, I was reminded again during this little jaunt that you can pretty much go anywhere in the Sierra or along its eastern slopes this time of year and quickly find tons of autumn color. I have a few favorites, indeed, and I understand that those just discovering the fall colors may want to go to “sure bet” places, but I’m having more and more fun just poking around and finding color in lots of odd little places. This location is very close to an area where many, many people were stopped to photograph some very spectacular color in a well-known place — but here, just a ways down the road, I was the only person shooting as cars whizzed past on their way to those other places.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Canyon, Haze

October 13, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Afternoon haze fills the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River

Westward flowing rivers, descending through deep canyons toward California’s Great Central Valley, are a major feature of the Sierra Nevada. Although one major river, the Kern, heads south and many smaller creeks take a short route down the eastern escarpment of the range, the gradual slope from the west means that the west side rivers often drain huge areas of the range and, though a combination of ancient glaciation and continuing river erosion, have cut many impressive canyons. Some are popular and frequently visited, such as Yosemite Valley and to a lesser extent Kings Canyon, but most of the others are not as well known.

On a hazy late afternoon I climbed the spine of some low granite ridges above the lake where we were camped and found myself looking directly down the course of the Tuolumne River as it makes its way through a deep and twisting canyon toward… sadly, the Hetch Hetchy reservoir. Fortunately, that abomination is not visible from this point, and instead the view is of a series of overlapping and receding ridges dropping to the bottom of the huge and remote canyon.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Mt. Conness, Dusk

October 10, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dusk light falls across Mt. Conness and northern Yosemite wilderness

This ridge holds an astonishing range of photographic subjects, ranging from the smallest (tiny trees growing through cracks in the rock) through the intimate landscapes of trees and boulders and culminating in some grand vistas of distant ridges and peaks. For several days, even though there were other nearby subjects calling out to me, I returned repeatedly to this area, whose size cannot be more than a few acres.

I climbed up to photograph on this ridge one final time on our last night at this location. At first I went back to take care of some unfinished business — photographing subjects that I had seen but not shot on previous evenings, looking for a few in evening light that I had noticed at other times of the day, and working to perfect and distill images of certain subjects that I had photographed earlier. I finished most of that work as the sun set and the light began to go, and I started back across the ridge toward camp. As I crossed the ridge I caught a view of distant Mount Conness — named after the senator whose bill created Yosemite as a national park in the 1800s — in the glow of post-sunset dusk light that was still illuminating the foreground forest and granite.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Category Archives: Photographs: Northern California

Pond and Autumn Aspens, Evening

Green and Yellow Aspens

Canyon, Haze

Mt. Conness, Dusk

Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.