Tag Archives: aspen

About the Yosemite “Rim” fire… and more

August 27, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

UPDATE and a NOTE:

Update: Shortly after I posted this, my reports on highway 120 through the park via the Tuolumne Meadows area were rendered incorrect/outdated by way of an updated announcement from the park service as follows:

“Beginning at 12:00pm on Wednesday, August 28th, Tuolumne Meadows and the High Sierra will only be accessible via Highway 120 East through Lee Vining. The Tioga Rd/Hwy 120 East will be temporarily closed between White Wolf Lodge and the Big Oak Flat Rd./Hwy 120 West at Crane Flat; the closure is estimated to be 3 to 4 days. Tuolumne Meadows Lodge, the High Sierra Camps, and Tuolumne Meadows and Porcupine Flat campgrounds all remain open.”

Basically, this means that you will not be able to use highway 120 as a route across the Sierra until further notice. I’m not surprised – in fact, I’ve been somewhat surprised that the road remained open this long. Apparently the following URL is also a good source of updates from the park: http://www.yosemitepark.com/yosemite-fire-update.aspx

Note: All of which brings me back to my original statement that I don’t have inside information on this fire, and that anyone traveling to the area needs to check official sources for conditions updates. I will likely not update this page as things change, so the information posted here should be regarded as potentially being out of date!

My original post follows…

—

A few people have asked me for information about the “Rim” fire which started not far from Groveland near highway 120, and which is currently burning along the northwest boundary of Yosemite National Park, generally moving east and north toward the highway 108 area. While I know much of this area fairly well from many years (decades, actually) of visits, I do not have any inside information about the fire itself, nor am I an expert on wildfires. One good source of (limited but objective) information is the Stanislaus National Forest Rim Fire Incident web page. A map on this page is a quite amazing source of information, especially when combined with some familiarity with the area and a reading of various written reports. (The version on the main page seems to be based on Google Maps, and allows you to scroll around and zoom in.) Lots of folks who live and work in the area are sharing updates on the usual social media sites. The Mariposa Gazette is another local news source.

The fire started on August 17 more or less midway between Groveland and the northwest park entrance and not far off of the highway 120 corridor near the Rim of the World area overlooking the canyon of the Tuolumne River. (Highway 120 is a common route for entry to the park from the west and northwest, and it connects via Tuolumne Meadows and Tioga Pass to the east side of the Sierra at the town of Lee Vining.) The spread of the fire at first was somewhat quick, which is no surprise given the extremely dry conditions in the Sierra following a second very dry winter and almost no real precipitation since late 2012. Then, between about August 20 and 23, the fire exploded, expanding very quickly to cover a huge area generally to the east and north of the starting point, with the fire generally racing northeast but also spreading to the north and south. Continue reading About the Yosemite “Rim” fire… and more →

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Aspen Leaves, First Light

June 21, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

First morning light on aspen trees and fall foliage, eastern Sierra Nevada, California

This past fall I had exactly one day to photograph aspens in the eastern Sierra Nevada. This was a bit odd for me, since I usually spend quite a number of days chasing fall aspen color up and down the east side of the range. But this year my target was a bit further away in Utah, and we merely paused for an extra day on the “east side” on our way to that other state. Fortunately, we hit great conditions, in terms of good aspen color and fine weather that didn’t prevent us from getting up to those trees.

Very early in the morning we headed up to an area that I have photographed many times. There are a couple of iconic photographic subjects at this location, but I mostly got them out of my system some years ago and now I look for somewhat less obvious subjects when I go here. I began by shooting some trees near the outlet stream of a lake, with early morning light behind the trees. After working that tricky but beautiful light for a while, I decided to go around to the far side of the lake to where a large stand of small but densely packed aspens stands at the base of a hillside. I got there before the sun came to this spot, so I quickly schlepped my gear up the hill a ways and into the end of the grove, setting up just before the sun arrived. Before the sun’s rays hit the tree, everything had a distinctly blue tone. As the edge of the shadow arrived, the aspen leaves began to glow more and to cast shadows on the trees in the background. These shadows quickly transitioned from soft and subtle to quite contrasty and sharply defined in a matter of seconds. This photograph was made just as the sunlight arrived but before it became intense, and the soft shadows of the leaves on the slender background trunks lasted just a moment.

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: Sierra Nevada

Autumn Aspen Trees, Boulder Field

June 7, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Colorful golden autumn aspen trees among eastern Sierra boulders.

This is yet another of the small set of eastern Sierra fall color photographs I made this year, almost entirely on this single day in very early October, when we paused here on our long drive to location far east of here. In a typical year, I would regard this very early date in October as being a bit too early for prime aspen color, but we did find some stands of trees that were showing very intense coloration. In some ways this wasn’t a total surprise, as I had seen some very early aspen color a couple of weeks earlier in sections of the eastern Sierra. One wonders what the cause of the unusual schedule of change might have been this year: the very dry preceding winter, global climate change, or simply an outlier in the normal range of variation.

In any case, we made the best use of this single day of eastern Sierra aspen chasing, starting early in the morning close to an eastern Sierra lake where I know I can usually find good color and then working outwards from there. After a midday break we resumed our search in the afternoon, heading up a slightly different route where we found a lot of very bright golden trees. This group was in a location that I return to frequently – an area of very broken granite and large boulders, with trees of various sizes. It is also an area that loses the sun quite early at this time of year, since it lies east of very tall mountains leading upward to the Sierra crest. To my way of thinking, this is a good thing, since I like to shoot in the soft and diffused shaded light.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Aspens, Boulder Mountain, Evening

May 1, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Autumn aspens in front of rugged landscape of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Utah

This was an especially beautiful evening on the shoulder of the Boulder Mountain area of Utah. Six months earlier, on our first visit to this state, we had passed over Boulder Mountain early in April, before the spring leaves had appeared on the tremendous aspen groves found here. I imagined that this must be quite a sight in the fall when all of those aspens would inevitably change to yellow and gold and red and orange. With this in mind we planned our fall visit to cross this area again in early October, figuring that this would be about the right time for fall color.

It turns out that we probably missed the absolute peak of color – partly because the change happens on a slightly different schedule in these Utah mountains than in “my” Sierra Nevada, and because the transition seemed to occur a bit early this year, perhaps due to dry conditions earlier in the year. When we arrived we found that at the highest elevations the trees were already devoid of leaves. However, as we passed around the shoulder of the range to turn toward Torrey, we came upon some extensive and beautiful stands of colorful trees just before sunset and stopped to make photographs. This photograph looks across nearby aspens in the shadow of high clouds and beyond to the sandstone terrain in the area between Capitol Reef National Park and the small town of Boulder, an area that we finally got to investigate a few days later after crossing over the high country of Capitol Reef. At the time I made this photograph there was a nice soft haze – my kind of conditions! – and high clouds to the west were creating a lightscape alternating shadows and sun that played across the terrain.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: aspen

About the Yosemite “Rim” fire… and more

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Aspen Leaves, First Light

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Aspens, Boulder Mountain, Evening

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

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