Tag Archives: alpine

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

Ellery Lake

March 21, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Early season morning light on Ellery Lake near Tioga Pass.

I made this photograph on the same early-season morning on which I made the vertical format photograph of the same scene that I recently posted. Ellery Lake is alongside highway 120, the “Tioga Pass Road,” just beyond the eastern boundary of the park and the Sierra crest. To be completely forthcoming, I made this photograph from the side of the road! (The many individuals who know this area well, and who have probably stopped to look at the same scene, already knew that…)

To briefly recap, the road here curves around the upper end of the lake above this small bay. Looking across the bay, the rocky edges of the lake are visible along with the steep talus slopes ascending to the peaks around Mt. Dana beyond. The spot has a natural beauty in terms of the forms of the landscape, but I think it is difficult to photograph as a whole – the light is the tricky thing. The earliest morning light is block by high peaks to the east and the late afternoon light goes quickly from sun to shade as the sun drops below ridges behind the camera position, and this light can be fairly flat since it comes from directly behind. This photograph was made in the morning, but not close to sunrise at all – it was two or three hours later. Even here the scene isn’t without technical challenges, especially from the dynamic range that spans from the shadows behind backlit rocks and trees to the very bright snow fields at upper right.

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

Melting Ice, Gaylor Lake and the Cathedral Range

March 18, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

The distant Cathedral Range rises above the melting ice of Gaylor Lake, Yosemite National Park.

Near the end of June last summer I hiked up here late in the day with my friends Mike and Karl. This was a somewhat unusual season in the Yosemite Sierra, in that there had been a lot of snow during the winter season and it had continued right on into spring. Consequently, the high passes opened up later than usual, and on a very late June day when things would typically be a bit more summer-ish, it looked more like late winter up here when we arrived.

I’ve visited this place quite a few times, but had never seen quite this scene before. More typically, the snow and ice are completely gone by the time I manage to get up there, and a typical visit usually entails arriving late on a warm afternoon and then hanging out in the sun while waiting for the evening light to come on. This time we were in snow before we crossed the ridge before the lake, and we had to think a bit about just how to head down toward the lake since the usual path was covered in snow. The lake itself was (obviously, judging from the photo!) still covered in ice, though melting was underway and the surface was a jigsaw puzzle of alternating blue pools and white ice.

We found a location near clumps of trees on rocky talus slopes above the lake to do our photography. In this photograph I shot down the length of the lake to mostly fill the frame with the melting ice. Beyond a small rocky rise at the end of the lake, the terrain drops off towards the meadows of the Tuolumne region, and beyond rise the peaks of the Cathedral range in early evening light.

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

Morning, Ellery Lake

March 17, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light on Ellery Lake and surrounding mountains near Tioga Pass.

Yosemite National Park visitors who enter or leave the park via the Tioga Pass Road route are familiar with the sub-alpine lakes just east of the pass including Tioga Lake, Ellery Lake, and many smaller ponds. Ellery Lake – which is made a bit higher by a dam on its outlet stream – is the last lake before the drop-off into Lee Vining Canyon, and a place that people often stop during the summer months. Even during the very early and late season it is a popular place – in the early season right after the road opens you can often see back-country skiers on the steep slopes above the lake.

I rarely pass this particular cove near the upper end of the lake without stopping. However, I have also found it a tricky photographic subject! Very early light is blocked by the very tall ridge whose lower slopes are seen in the distance in this photograph. It is often quite windy. Late in the day the color of the light can be special, but it also tends to be almost directly behind the photographer and to leave some deep foreground shadows. There are other places like this – they seem like they should be photographic “slam dunks,” but they turn out to be more difficult than they appear. Or maybe it is just me! :-)

In any case, on this late June morning I had earlier finished photographing in the Mono Lake area and was heading back up towards Tuolumne Meadows. And, as always, as I drove around the curve above this cove I caught a view of the lake out of the corner of my eye and couldn’t resist stopping.

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

McGee Canyon and Mount Morgan

December 10, 2010 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Snow crested Mount Morgan rises above McGee Canyon and the sagebrush-covered hills of Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra Nevada.

I’ve been traveling to the Sierra for many years. My first recollection of the range is a faint mental image of a shoreline park at Lake Tahoe when my family moved to California – I was four years old. My next memory is of staying at a small motel in El Portal next to the high water of the Merced River back in the days before the current mega-hotels were erected. One thing that all of my early Sierra experiences had in common is that I always approached the range from the west since I lived (and still live) in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the person whose orientation to the range is from the west, the Sierras are a range that begins almost imperceptibly in the Central Valley. Although you can see distant peaks from the Valley on clear days, it is hard to say where the range begins. As you head east you encounter some very small and rounded hills which gradually get larger. Eventually you are going up more than up and down as you travel through oak and grass lands. At some point the road rises into forest, but the mountain tops are mostly rounded and forest covered. Keep going and a few rocky prominences begin to appear along the ridges and some distant granite peaks become visible. Only after a lot of driving do you find yourself in the higher reaches of the range, and this only in the few areas where roads cross from west to east. In most places you cannot even see the summit of the range close up from the west without walking a long ways.

It was only many years later that I first went over the summit of the range and saw it from the east side. The Sierra is (are?) completely different when approached this way. Instead of a long, gradual, and relatively gentle rise to high valleys and forests and meadows, the eastern escarpment of the Sierra rises abruptly – one might say violently – and directly, in most places, from the high desert sagebrush country of Owens Valley and similar places. This wall of peaks seems almost inaccessible, and I imagine that many people who only drive past on highway 395 must regard it that way.

This photograph was made from a spot just a mile or two east of highway 395, out an a gravel road that I know. I have photographed this shadowed foreground ridge and the peaks beyond in the past, so I had a fairly good idea of what I would find at this location before I made the photograph on an early October morning when fall storms had dusted the highest peaks with snow. I used a somewhat long lens and tight framing to emphasize the rise from the foreground desert to the very high peaks beyond.

This photograph is not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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