Tag Archives: erratic

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

Gaylor Basin and the Cathedral Range, Evening

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Gaylor Basin and the Cathedral Range, Evening
Gaylor Basin and the Cathedral Range, Evening

Gaylor Basin and the Cathedral Range, Evening. Yosemite National Park, California. July 26, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Evening shadows stretch across the boulder-filled meadows and forests of Gaylor Basin with the peaks of the Cathedral Range on the skyline, Yosemite National Park.

On the first evening of my late-July four-day visit to Yosemite’s high country along Tioga Pass Road I decided to visit this favorite location of mine. It is a short (but steep!) hike from near Tioga Pass over a nearby ridge to reach this quiet basin with its many lakes, long distance views of the Cathedral Range, and the treeline terrain of rocks and trees that I believe is my very favorite in the Sierra.

I started out after my mid-afternoon “dinner” and the drive to the trailhead from my camp at Porcupine Flat. Probably because it was so late in the day, I met a fair number of people hiking back out but only saw two others in the entire basin once I arrived. I suppose this is one of the advantages of keeping odd “photographer’s hours” – while most people are heading back to camp to fix dinner, I’m heading out to catch the evening light.

In the end, I didn’t make many photographs on this evening. I mostly wandered, something I love to do in these high open basins. I walked around the first lake, passing over some still-unmelted snow, and crossed the very full outlet stream, trying to skirt the wettest portions of the meadow by looking for rocky terrain. I finally settled on an area just below the lake and made a few photographs of trees and rocks and the long, shallow valley leading toward the main trunk of the Tuolumne River and the mountains beyond. I finished just after dusk, climbed back up the ridge as darkness came on, and finished the hike back to my car with the help of the light from my headlamp.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Northern California, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Glacial Erratics and Trees, Lembert Dome

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Glacial Erratics and Trees, Lembert Dome
Glacial Erratics and Trees, Lembert Dome

Glacial Erratics and Trees, Lembert Dome. Yosemite National Park, California. June 5, 2010. a© Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Glacial erratics and trees at the base of Lembert Dome, Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park.

This photograph was made last spring in early June, when I drove over Tioga Pass on a quick one-day jaunt right around the time that the road was re-opened for the season after its annual winter closure. The road opened a bit later than usual in 2010 due to above average and late snow fall, and when I crossed there was as much or more snow than I recall seeing up there.

This was one of my marathon drive days. I started well before dawn in the San Francisco Bay Area and arrived in Yosemite in the very early morning and without any concrete plan – except that the ideas of visiting waterfalls and possibly getting up to Tioga Pass were on my mind. I did stop near the Valley first, where I made a series of photographs of Cascade Creek in virtually full flow. After doing this and making a very brief visit to the Valley, I decided to visit the high country along Tioga Pass road. I went just over the pass before turning back. There was so much snow still around that in most places it still looked much more like winter than like early June.

I finally started heading back to the west, as my plan was to return late to the SF Bay Area. As I left the pass and started down toward Tuolumne Meadows the light began to get “interesting” as the sun dropped lower in the west and some high clouds occasionally softened the light. As I drove past Lembert Dome I thought of photographing these glacial erratics that sit on the apron at the bottom of the dome before making one last stop to photograph snow-covered Tuolumne Meadow in the day’s last light.

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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

Lodgepole Grove and Boulders – Lembert Dome

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Lodgepole Grove and Boulders - Lembert Dome
Lodgepole Grove and Boulders - Lembert Dome

Lodgepole Grove and Boulders – Lembert Dome. Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park, California. June 5, 2010. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Glacial erratics and a grove of lodgepole trees along the lower slopes of Lembert Dome, Tuolumne Meadows, Yosemite National Park.

As I drove down into the Tuolumne Meadows area from Tioga Pass in the early evening I caught a brief glimpse of some interesting diffused light on boulders lying across the lower slopes of Lembert Dome and decided to stop. On a typical high-season summer evening this would be a very crowded place, but on this early June evening most people had left and I had it almost to myself.

By the time I parked and unloaded my gear and walked up this slope the light was not quite what I had seen from the car. The clouds to the west had thickened a bit and the glow that I had originally seen in the light was dissipating. I decided to stay to see if the light would come back, since I could see that the clouds might move enough to let the scene brighten a bit. In the end I didn’t get the light I had in mind, but I think this photograph may serve as a study that let me work out a few things I’ll do differently when I return to shoot this subject, perhaps later this summer.

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.

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Technical Data:
Canon EOS 5D Mark II
Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM at 87mm
ISO 200, f/16, 1/15 second

keywords: yosemite, national, park, sierra, nevada, mountain, spring, nature, lembert, dome, glacial, erratic, polish, rock, boulder, lodgepole, tamarack, pine, grove, trees, evening, light, late, slope, texture, landscape, nature, california, usa, north america, lichen, stock

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

Granite, Meadow, and Trees – Fletcher Lake

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Granite, Meadow, and Trees - Fletcher Lake

Granite, Meadow, and Trees – Fletcher Lake. Yosemite National Park, California. September 10, 2009. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Autumn colors and morning light on glaciated granite, late-season meadow grasses, and trees near Vogelsang High Sierra Camp, Fletcher Lake, Yosemite National Park, California.

Technically this was shot near the end of summer, not in early autumn… but in the high country the observable change of seasons comes before the autumnal equinox, so it often really feels much more like autumn that summer by the second week of September. Many streams a low or dry, virtually all of the grasses have gone dormant and taken on the brown/gold color, the high country animals are clearly engaged in preparation for winter, and the number of human visitors greatly diminishes. (And at Fletcher Lake, employees are starting to dismantle the Vogelsang High Sierra Camp for the season.)

Fletcher Lake is a very familiar location for me. I go there at least once every year, sometimes more, and I almost always visit near the very end of the season. Because I know the area and its surroundings so well by now, I think that I see it in a very different way than I used to. I still notice the most striking features – the tremendous view toward Mount Conness, the impressive, fractured face of Fletcher Peak (the base of which is in the background of this photograph), the height of Vogelsang Peak. But more and more I look for the effect of warm late-season light on granite, meadow, and trees.

This photograph was made in the early morning. The very first light is blocked by a ridge to the east and by Fletcher Peak, but soon the light begins to come around the shoulder of Fletcher and light up the meadow grasses and trees, yet it leaves the face of Fletcher Peak in shadow.

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

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