Mt. Gibb Sunset. Yosemite National Park. August 6, 2005. © Copyright Dan Mitchell.

After taking a lot of sunset pictures at Tioga Pass on August 6 I figured that I could finally start the long drive back to the Bay Area. I was wrong.

The beautiful light continued all the way down to Tuolumne Meadows and I couldn’t avoid stopping to take more pictures including this one of Mt. Gibb.

I got home quite late…

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Tioga Pass Tarn at Sunset. Yosemite National Park. August 6, 2005. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.

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.)

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Melting Ice in Alpine Tarn. Yosemite National Park. July 8, 2005. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

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.