Category Archives: Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Great Western Divide

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Great Western Divide
Great Western Divide

Great Western Divide. Sequoia National Park. August 2, 2010. © Copyright 2010 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Sierra Nevada backcountry near the Great Western Divide

The back story to this photograph could end up being quite long, but I’ll try to constrain it a bit. First, credit to my friend David Hoffman, whose recent effort to share a bunch of his black and white photographs has inspired me to share a few of mine that haven’t been public before, and to go back to some older images that have languished in my raw file archives and do the work necessary to bring them to the light of day. This is one of those photograph, from a trip into a wonderful and remote section of the Southern Sierra that I undertook with group of friends over four years ago. The general area is one that I had long wanted to visit, since a strange college backpacking trip that had one of the lakes in the area as its objective, but which was derailed when my buddies and I realized that we were not up the rather intense trip we had embarked upon, and we ended up revising our trip in mid-stream — and we ended up many miles away from here. On this 2010 trip, many decades later, I finally got into this area that I had thought about during the intervening years.

The actual target destination on this 2010 trip was a particular alpine lake that I had been curious about since that original visit. We did go to that lake, a high barren lake above timberline, on this trip. Ironically, that destination from so many years ago did not particularly excite me when we got there — we stayed briefly and then moved on. But the place we ended up after that was very special. We looped into an area far up in the upper drainage of the Kern River, a location that is off the beaten track and clearly not visited that often. Our campsite near the location of this photograph showed virtually no signs of previous visits, a rare thing in the Sierra. This beautiful landscape of timberline lakes and meadows, perhaps my favorite sort of Sierra place, sits at the base of huge alpine canyons leading to massive and rugged summits. Fortunately, its remoteness and the difficulty of the approach is likely to sustain the solitude of the place.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist 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.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Lake and Rocky Peninsula

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Lake and Rocky Peninsula
Lake and Rocky Peninsula

Lake and Rocky Peninsula. Kings Canyon National Park, California. September 12, 2013. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Smooth water behind a small rocky peninsula reflects clouds above a high Sierra back-country lake, Kings Canyon National Park

We stopped at this small lake along the route to and from our destination during our September 2013 nine-day photographic excursion into the high Sierra back-country of Kings Canyon National Park. Between the trailhead and the 11,000′ basin where we camped for nearly a week, there was a 15+ mile hike, two near-12,000′ passes, and a final climb of well over a thousand feet – too far for our party to travel in a single day. So we ended up making a stop here on the inbound and outbound trips. This is a view a few steps away from our campsite near the outlet stream.

My previous visit to this lake had been several decades earlier, back on my very first solo Sierra Nevada backpacking trip. That is a story worth its own lengthy post at some point, but the most striking point may be that I decided that my very first solo trip would be two weeks long! Given that solo backpacking may strike some as a stretch in several ways, a shorter first trip might seem more sensible – but in retrospect I’m glad that I went out for so long. After a few initial days of dealing with the expected “issues” of solo backcountry travel, I got past those concerns and have rarely felt as connected to the natural world as I did during the second half of that trip. At about that point I stopped at this lake on the walk between Bubbs Creek and Rae Lakes, and I recall the next day’s climb to the Pass, where I sat for a long time, in no hurry to leave or get to any place in particular.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Morning Sun on Rocky Peninsula

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Morning Sun on Rocky Peninsula
Morning Sun on Rocky Peninsula

Morning Sun on Rocky Peninsula. Kings Canyon National Park, California. September 15, 2013. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Morning sun strikes a rocky peninsula in a subalpine Sierra Nevada lake, Kings Canyon National Park

This is another photograph from last September’s nine-day photography sojourn into the high Sierra backcountry of Kings Canyon National Park with three photographer friends. We traveled to a remote 11,000′ basin, where we set up camp and photographed for nearly a week, coming to intimately know the surrounding landscape of lakes, streams, granite, trees, and the changing conditions of atmosphere and light which varied with the weather and the time of day. By spending time in such a place you have the opportunity to look beyond the first impressions of towering granite peaks and immense vistas and to begin to seem more of the smaller details that form the fabric this high country world.

On one of my morning walks in the surrounding terrain I visited a nearby basin full of lakes ranging in size from tiny pools and tarns to quite large lakes filling the basins scooped out by ancient glaciers. This basin is almost surrounded by nearby tall peaks and ridges, though it is open to the north-east as well. Due to these high walls, the sun does not penetrate down to its lowest levels at sunrise, but instead shows up over an extended period as the sun tops nearby ridges and the sun-shadow line traverses the valley. This portion of the lake in the photograph lies against more or less the south side of the valley, where a large and rocky slope ascends toward a ridge that shades the area much later in the morning. At the moment I made this photograph, the sun had reached the thin peninsula of rock in the foreground but the more distant rocks are illuminated by light reflected from other faces nearby.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Alpine Trees, Last Light

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Alpine Trees, Last Light
Alpine Trees, Last Light

Alpine Trees, Last Light. Kings Canyon National Park, California. September 17, 2013. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Late afternoon light on small alpine trees growing in glaciated terrain, Kings Canyon National Park

This is a photograph from the latter portion of our nine-day photographic trip into the eastern High Sierra of Kings Canyon National Park last September. By the time I made this photograph I had been on the trail about a week, and we were nearing the end of our lengthy stay at our 11,000′ campground in the backcountry of Kings Canyon National Park. All such trips transition through a series of phases, and at this point I was in a phase of feeling more and more comfortable and familiar with these surroundings that we had explored so carefully – but I was also beginning to recognize that the end of this trip was not too far off.

Late on this afternoon I did one of my by-now-customary walks up the small, lake-filled valley ascending to the south from our camp. Because of very high ridges to our west, the sun was blocked from the valley terrain somewhat early in the day – late afternoon rather than evening. I reached the upper valley while there was still sun, but almost immediately the sun/shadow border began to move down into the valley and across the trees, rocks, and lake. I made a point of following this boundary, where the light can be at its most interesting at this time of day. Consequently I was moving almost constantly, generally moving west and north across and down the valley. In many cases I had only a brief moment to photograph whatever was being struck by the light at the edge of the moving shadow, so I was working each opportunity rather quickly. When I made this photograph the light had left the background talus fields and was still just striking this row of trees on top of a granite bench next to a small lake.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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.