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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Eastern Escarpment

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Eastern Escarpment
The eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada rises from desert hills to rugged aretes lit by dawn sun

Eastern Escarpment. Sierra Nevada, California. October 10, 2015. © Copyright 2015 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada rises from desert hills to rugged aretes lit by dawn sun

Depending on how you approach the range, the Sierra Nevada presents two quite different aspects to the visitor. For many decades, as a long time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I was only familiar with one of them. I always came to the range from the west, on long drives over coastal mountains and then across the Great Central Valley. As I approached the east side of the Valley I would encounter the low hills, at first almost imperceptible, that humbly mark the beginning of this might range. Because it tilts upward from the west, the western slopes are overall very gradual. Rising through these first low hills, the grass and oak covered landscape raises over a distance of many miles, and it is quite a while before the range starts to feel like “the mountains,” and many hours before the visitor arrives in the high alpine zone of rugged granite peaks. Even here, to the west of the crest there are plenty of gentle valleys and meadows.

The east side is a radically different world, as I finally began to understand two or three decades ago. The eastern base of the range is an arid near-desert place, made more so by Los Angeles’ historic draining of east side waters that once irrigated now-dry places and once filled today’s dusty playas with shallow lakes. The Sierra rises abruptly from this lower landscape, and in places you can look up nearly 10,000′ to the highest summits — you stand in desert and look at alpine peaks, and you see every zone in between. I made this photograph at dawn from one such valley location where the landscape that of sagebrush and playa and alkali lakes. From this spot I looked across low hills with the first coniferous trees toward the abrupt rise of the eastern foothills, backed by jagged and rugged slopes leading upward to high peaks.

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” is available from Heyday Books and Amazon.
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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Autumn Flurries, Morning

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Autumn Flurries, Morning
Autumn Flurries, Morning

Autumn Flurries, Morning. Long Valley, California. October 13, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

An early autumn weather front drops morning snow flurries along the rugged Sierra Nevada crest near Mount Morrison

This is another photograph from the final morning of our September photographic trip to the eastern Sierra Nevada. We were surprised to find it snowing lightly when we work up in Mammoth that morning, since there had been no mention of such weather in the previous day’s forecast. We decided to stick with our plan of making a big loop out to the east of Mammoth Lakes and then north by a back route to Mono Lake and highway 395 for our return trip. So we headed down the road out of Mammoth Lakes in the pre-dawn near-darkness and then started out across Long Valley.

Out in the valley as dawn approached, it became clear that the atmosphere was doing some very interesting things along the eastern edge of the Sierra. At first we saw a very strong weather cell over Mammoth Lakes that appeared to be dropping quite a bit of rain or snow, even though where we were it was virtually clear overhead. So we stopped and set up to make some photographs of these conditions. We continued shooting after the first red dawn light and watched as the snow squall worked its way south along the Sierra crest. In this photograph there is light snow falling along the ridge near Mount Morrison, but since the clouds did not extend to the east, the early morning light is hitting the upper slopes of this line of peaks.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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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.