Tag Archives: bark

Photographs: Coastal Redwoods, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California

Redwood Trees

June 4, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Closely spaced coast redwood trees at Butano State Park

Going to this spot was a special and unusual pleasure. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay Area almost all of my life (save my first four years in Minnesota) I know may way around much of the local outdoor scene quite well. From the time I was a small child my family spent weekends visiting the many area parks, often picnicking and then hiking extensively. Yet somehow I had never visited Butano Redwoods State Park, tucked into the coastal mountains between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz, and a very quite alternative to some of the more popular and busy redwood parks.

I’m not yet any sort of expert on this park, but the central feature appears to be an intimate little creek flowing down a small and quiet valley. It looks to me like the area must have been logged many years ago, as there are old stumps of huge long-gone trees, and most of the living trees are relatively slender. But they are big enough to give the feeling of the redwood forest, and even in this dry year the place is lush and full of vegetation. And during my short walk to photograph in this watershed I saw only a handful of other people. I spotted this tightly spaced group of trees across the canyon and positioned myself so that I could photograph a wall of redwood trunks with a few slender trunks breaking up the larger patterns. A few moments later the thing fog overhead began to clear and the bright shafts of light made the forest beautiful… but almost impossible to photograph!

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

Early Evening Forest Light

May 15, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Yosemite Valley forest in early evening light.

This is an “intimate landscape” photograph of an otherwise nondescript little scene that you could probably find repeated thousands of times in Yosemite and multiples of that throughout the Sierra. I saw it while wandering along a roadside trail in search of more dogwood blossoms in a spot where few are likely thinking much about the view, as it is located near an intersection that people might pass through as they exit the Valley.

These little scenes are everywhere and I don’t think it is all that hard to find them… if one just slows down a bit and looks a bit more attentively. In this case, there was a momentary effect of light as the sun dropped low enough to cast long shadows through the dense part of the forest yet still light the upper portions of taller trees beyond.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Pacific Northwest

Tree Farm, Skagit Valley

March 24, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dense winter trees in the grove of a tree farm, Skagit Valley, Washington.

Back in February I spent a few days in Washington state, and during this visit I had an opportunity to spend one full day photographing in lower Skagit Valley north of Seattle. Among other things, main attractions there at this time of year can include spectacular views of some of the nearby snow-covered peaks of the Cascade range (or so I’m told… ;-), impressive flocks of migratory birds including trumpeter swans and snow geese, and other birds such as owls and bald eagles. Having recently become a big fan of photographing the migratory birds of California’s Central Valley, my main goal on this visit was to photograph the geese and swans.

I arrived in the area just before sunrise – or what would have been sunrise if it hadn’t been completely socked in by clouds and intermittently raining lightly. After a bit of looking around I found a great location for photographing gigantic flocks of snow geese as they landed, collected on the ground, and then suddenly took of in huge groups. A bit later in the day my brother Richard joined me. Since he actually knows this area, having lived and photographed here for many years, I took his lead and we moved on to look for bald eagles. (Well, we also moved on to have a wonderful brunch in a nearby town first…) After a bit of driving around we came to this spot which I understand is some sort of tree farm. Among these tall, slender, straight, and tightly packed trees, we spotted a few bald eagles roosting in the upper branches. We found one beautiful bird in trees very close to the road, stopped, and began to quietly get ready to shoot – but the bird was having none of it, and it flew to other trees that were too far off for photography. However, this grove itself seemed interesting to me, and in the soft, cloudy light I like the way that the white trunks and the dense small branches appeared against the background of a further ridge.

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

Juniper Tree Trunk, Detail

August 13, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The heavily weathered and contorted trunk of juniper trees near Olmsted Point, Yosemite National Park.

These Sierra juniper trees grow in the most improbable places – on top of granite domes and slabs, with roots somehow finding sustenance in cracks and bits of gravel, and no doubt exposed to the full force of mountain storms. This is actually a group of trees that take advantage of the same crack in the otherwise solid granite, and which have grown together into what almost appears to be one very wide tree at first.

Because of their toughness, the way they grow almost into the rock, and the fact that the trees continue to live even when portions have died, it sometimes seems to me that these trees can have a character that is closer to that of the rock itself than just about any other living thing in the Sierra. The oldest branches and roots grow into the rock and have been shaped so much by their relationship to it that they can almost take on a rock-like character themselves.

These particular specimens happen to be growing part way up a dome-like granite slab above Tioga Pass Road as it passes through Yosemite’s high country. It appears that part of the treed may have been affected by fire, and dead sections have been worn and eroded by the tough sub-alpine environment. The only obvious signs of life in this close up image are the bits of moss or lichen growing in a few cracks in the wood.

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G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: bark

Redwood Trees

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Early Evening Forest Light

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Tree Farm, Skagit Valley

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Juniper Tree Trunk, Detail

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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.