Tag Archives: face

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

First Light, Base of Tucki Mountain and the Panamint Range

February 25, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

First morning light on the rugged landscape of the base of Tucki Mountain and the Panamint Range, Death Valley National Park, California

This photograph was made from a location a ways up from the bottom of Death Valley, from which I could look directly across at the lower slopes of gigantic Tucki Mountain as the first morning light worked its way down toward the lower ridges and the huge alluvial fan at the base of the mountain. At the moment I made the exposure the light was just beginning to fill this slanting area below the rugged mountains, and the light was softened by morning haze.

Tucki Mountain is a huge peak that almost seems to me to be large enough to count as its own minor mountain range. It rises above Stovepipe Wells, and extends a great distance east, south, and west of there. It is laced with deep canyons and its lower slopes are heavily eroded to reveal tilting and twisting strata. Another large valley lies on beyond the foreground spur ridge in this photograph, and beyond that the Panamint Range rises to its crest at 11,000+’ Telescope Peak.

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: Desert, Photographs: Southern California

Petroglyphs

January 20, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 3 Comments

Petroglyphs on a rock face overlooking desert terrain.

Encountering these very old and very mysterious traces of people who lived in this desert terrain many, many years ago is always a special experience. Perhaps you have read the following story here before, but I think of it every time I encounter these things. Well over a decade ago I was camped in a place in Death Valley National Park that lies somewhere between popular and the anonymous wild spaces far out in the back areas of the park. I was with a group of other people. In the morning I wandered away from the place where we were camped. I crossed a wash and walked up onto the base of a great alluvial fan, found a suitable “sitting rock,” and just sat there for a while taking in the immense space and silence. I happened to look down at the rocky ground and I an oddly shaped rock caught my attention. I’m no expert on these things, but it seemed completely clear to me that this rock had been shaped by human hands. (I later came to understand that it was probably a “knife,” perhaps one designed for scraping.)

At the moment I saw and then picked up and held this rock, the place was transformed from a semi-wilderness of rock and scattered plants into a very different sort of thing – a place that had been the home of people, many years before I sat there on my rock. My thoughts turned from the landscape around me to try to imagine the person who had created and held this rock – who was this person? what was it like to live in such a place in such a time? what had happened to them? I returned the rock to the desert floor and walked back to my camp.

The petroglyphs in the photograph are located in another place in the park, and I have visited and photographed them more than once. These are perhaps the most precious and among the most fragile things in this desert, which is why I never write about the specifics of their locations. (I also have photographs of petroglyphs that have been defiled by thoughtless morons.) If you know where these are, let’s keep it to ourselves, OK?

The first time I photographed these examples of rock art, I simply shot them straight on so that the shapes were as clear and large as possible. Since then I had been thinking of trying to photograph them in a way that might reveal them in the context of the larger surroundings – perhaps as the person or people who made them might have seen the place.

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

Glacial Erratics, Near Glen Aulin

November 26, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Three glacial erratic boulders atop a granite dome near Glen Aulin, Yosemite National Park.

Looking for something to photograph one evening during my September back-country photography trip into the Glen Aulin and McCabe Lakes area of Yosemite National Park, I climbed up from our camp site to the top of this small granite dome or “whaleback” above the valley of Glen Aulin. The dome is merely the most open and exposed portion of a ridge of more durable rock that rises a ways up the slope from near where we were camped, and from its “summit” I had a 360-degree panorama of the surrounding landscape as the day came to an end.

When I first arrived at this spot more than an hour earlier, the sky was almost completely clouded over. This was one of those situations in which the immediate photographic prospects seemed quite limited, with gray skies and murky atmosphere, but with some potential for interesting things to happen if the clouds thinned as sunset approached. So I decided to stick around in this spot rather than wandering around looking for something else, and in the end the clouds did thin. Before I made this photograph, one of the last of the evening, I had managed to find a range of subjects as the light changed: the light from breaks in the clouds began to move across a forest to my right and light a small prominence nearby; light coming over the ridge at the far right back-lit some haze behind trees on a lower ridge that was closer to me; and finally the remaining clouds took on a bit of color right as the sun dropped below the horizon.

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

Tuolumne River Canyon Below Glen Aulin

November 22, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

The Tuolumne River enters Tuolumne River Canyon below the Glen Aulin High Sierra Camp.

This photograph looks west from a rocky point along the Tuolumne River just below Glen Aulin in the Yosemite National Park back-country. In September I spent a total of four nights in this specific area and photographed in and around the granite bowl that rises from the river near the foreground rocks and spreads to the right of the area shown here. The photograph was made very late in the afternoon – it had been raining when I arrived at Glen Aulin but, as often happens in the Sierra, the clouds dissipated later in the day and the skies were starting to clear before sunset.

While my favorite Sierra landscape is at the elevations where the last small trees give way to alpine tundra meadows and the rocky slopes of the highest peaks, there is also something very compelling about these lower (from my point of view) elevation areas, and especially about this particular spot along the Tuolumne. Looking west from this point along the river I had the distinct feeling that I was standing more or less on a boundary between the higher and more alpine zones (exemplified by the Tuolumne Meadows area) and the beginnings of the lower areas in which I feel like I’m heading towards the Central Valley. Here, all of the really tall peaks are behind me (OK, some are to my right…) and before me the land overall drops towards the Valley, the slightly hazy light and air of which is in the far distance in this photograph.

Making this feeling even stronger for me is the fact that very close to Glen Aulin, the Tuolumne abruptly changes from a generally meandering river that descends very gradually for the most part past large meadows and forests to one that drops precipitously into an increasingly narrow and steep canyon surrounded by granite slabs and domes and peaks that begin to take on an appearance that reminds me of Yosemite Valley.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: face

First Light, Base of Tucki Mountain and the Panamint Range

Petroglyphs

Glacial Erratics, Near Glen Aulin

Tuolumne River Canyon Below Glen Aulin

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