Category Archives: Stories

Stories

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. Mosquitos, Too.

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Just back from a few days in the slightly smoky (nothing compared to the rest of California) Yosemite high country in the Young Lakes area. At the moment I’m wading through hundreds of emails that came in while I was gone – so if you emailed me you can expect a reply before too long.

The three Young Lakes are at about 10,000′ and a one day hike in from Tuolumne Meadows in the Yosemite NP. I’ve the area quite a few times in the past, usually in late-August though about mid-October but this is the first time I’ve gotten out there in early July. I was looking forward to photographing a particular panorama of the Cathedral range from a beautiful lupine-filled high meadow where the trail crosses Dingley Creek. It was beautiful, but about a week shy of being “lupine-filled” and the brownish haze floating up from the Central Valley was not quite what I had in mind. Maybe next time!

About those mosquitos… Has anyone else noticed that the intensity of the Sierra wildflower displays is almost perfectly proportional to the density of the mosquitos? Until this trip I had three Really Awful Mosquito stories I used to tell – two from the Sierra and one from The Yukon.

Now I have four. They were awful at the lower Young Lake, which isn’t surprising considering the much of the shoreline is essentially a bog. I spent about 13 hours in my bivy sack the first evening/night to escape them, and the next morning thought I’d see if the middle and upper lakes were better. They weren’t. I finally got a bit of relief by climbing a good distance above the upper lake, but then it was time to descend.

Although photo opportunities were somewhat limited by the smoke, I’m hopeful that I’ll have a few to post from this trip before long.

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.

G Dan Mitchell: Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email


All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Locations, Stories

More Alaska Thoughts

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Jim M. Goldstein must be in an Alaska frame of mind this week – I see he posted again on this topic. The more recent post reminded me of a couple of interesting things about Alaska photography, regarding the light in particular – not that there aren’t scores of other things also worth mentioning.

Near the summer solstice the days are extremely long no matter where you are in Alaska. While the daylight is continuous above the arctic circle, even further south it is light almost all the time. The first time I visited I was accompanying a couple of my kids on a week long backpacking trip with a school group. We flew into Juneau and camped at a lake very close to a glacier. (That’s another thing that is different in Alaska – our camp site was within hailing distance of a huge glacier… but we could also send someone down the road a few miles the other way to pick up pizzas. :-) The next morning the kids were trying to figure out if it ever got dark. “I was up at 11:30 and it wasn’t dark. How about you?” “I was up at 1:00 a.m and there was light. Anyone up at midnight?” In the end, while it got “darker,” it never got dark. Later, I was out in Skagway in the middle of the “night” and it was more like dark twilight.

All of this means a couple of interesting things for photographers.

First, you’ll have more shooting time than you can probably handle. When it is light for 21 or 22 hours per day you’ll likely end up completely exhausted if you shoot the way you would at lower latitudes.

(A non-photographic story: We hiked over the Chilcoot Pass one day. We got up at 3:00 a.m., but this wasn’t the problem you might imagine. Sure, it was early, but the sun was already up and it didn’t feel like 3:00 in the morning. We got up, quickly ate and packed, and hiked for hours. I think we crossed the pass sometime in the middle of the morning. After killing a lot of time on the pass we finally headed down the other side, stopping along the way for lunch and general trailside stuff. We finally encountered one of the camping huts on the Canadian side and pause there for awhile. We moved on and arrived at our intended camp near a lake. We began to set up but were informed by a Canadian ranger than his “clients” would need our campsites. Hmmm. We went ahead and spent a couple hours more here fixing dinner, repacked, and headed on down the trail 3 or 4 more miles to another campsite. Here we finally set up camp and I recall finally finishing my day at 10:00 p.m…. with the sun still in the sky!)

Second… what amazing light! While the days are very long, the sun never gets all that high in the sky. The sun doesn’t “rise” as much as “rotate” around you. Consequently “golden hour” light goes on and on and on for hours and hours. Perhaps “drunk on light” might describe your reaction to this.

Finally, an illustrative story from a conversation I had at Beaver Creek near the Yukon/Alaska border. We had come in late in the day after riding through scattered thunder showers. Rather than camp we decided to get “hostel” rooms. In the evening we were hanging out in the lodge and I remember asking one of the locals about the weather. The answer was, more or less, “thundershowers in the evening, but the sun should be out by midnight.” He was right – the sun came out at about 11:30.

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.

G Dan Mitchell: Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email


All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

News, Stories

Spring 2008 in Death Valley

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(Update 2025: Due to server changes over the years, some older photographs no longer appear in old articles. Unfortunately thesis one that is affected. See my gallery site for hundreds of Death Valley photographs.)

Being a college faculty member I’m fortunate to get some time off for spring break around the beginning of April. During the past few years I’ve headed to Death Valley National Park to do a bit of photography during the first week of April, and this year was no exception. The plan this year was to meet my brother at Stovepipe Wells on April 1 – he had already been in the area for about a week – and then spend the next four days hitting some of the many interesting photographic sites in and around the Valley.

Continue reading Spring 2008 in Death Valley →
News, Stories

A Note About Some Upcoming Photographs

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A series of recent photographs from the Big Sur California coastline will appear here over the next few days, and I thought I’d share a few things about these images beforehand.

Last weekend I headed down toward the Monterey Peninsula with a new lens that I wanted to try out. My plan was to stop early in the morning at Point Lobos and shoot some familiar subjects there. Knowing that this park opens late (absurdly late, from the perspective of any self respecting photographer), I left home later than usual and stopped for coffee on the way. I still arrived a good half hour before the gates would open at 9:00 a.m. I turned off the car, opened the windows, and prepared to sit in the line and wait.

And then it hit me that sitting there in my car for a half hour on such a beautiful morning was absurd. I did a u-turn and spontaneously headed south on Highway 1. Within the first mile or two I stopped a couple times but the view was only “predictably pretty” and not really worth photographing. I did notice unusual amounts of mist hugging the waterline, the result of some very big winter surf. I kept driving, with a vague plan to perhaps go as far as the Bixby Bridge.

I came over one of the rises that sit between the creek drainages that you cross as you drive this route and there in front of me was a stunning sight. Along the road in the vicinity of Bixby Bridge the coastal bluffs sloped down toward surf/mist from huge waves that was partially obscuring the coastal rock formations, and the mist was glowing luminously in the morning backlight. The waves were stupendous and the coastline hills rose above this mist into blue sky. I was stopped dead in my tracks. Or my lane. Or something.

I pulled over and set up the tripod, fitting the new lens on my camera, and began to take in the scene, looking for compositions that caught the combination of backlight, surf, mist, and coastal formations – and hoping that it wouldn’t all disappear before I could start shooting. In the end I came up with four images that I like a great deal, all of which will appear here during the next four days. I’ll give away my preferences in advance and say that my two favorites are a portrait orientation photograph that includes a natural arch in the foreground with Bixby Bridge barely visible in the distance, and a telephoto shot of a lone fisherman on the rocks with roiling surf and rugged rocks in the background.

And all because Point Lobos didn’t open early enough for me. :-)

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.

G Dan Mitchell: Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email


All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.