I came over Tioga Pass last Saturday during the hour before sunset. I planned to re-take a picture of a small tarn below the parking lot at the pass. After completing that shot I happened to look behind me and saw the light on the distant peak over a different tarn.
I quickly moved the tripod and took a series of photos. This is a combination of two exposures, one set for the shaded foreground lake and the other for the distant ridge and sky.
(A tarn is a small, shallow alpine lake filled with snowmelt water, sometimes with no outlet stream.)
This little tarn (a small alpine snowmelt pond) sits on a low ridge between Mono and Parker Passes in the Tioga Pass area of Yosemite National Park, very close to the eastern park boundary.
I happened upon this ice formation while walking cross-country between the two passes, and I stopped to take some pictures. I thought of getting out the tripod but was too lazy. That decision is usually a bad one, but not in this case. It turned out that the leftmost piece of ice fell over while I was taking the picture. It isn’t apparent here, but it an enlargement you can just see the blur as it starts to topple.
