“Alpine Lake, Mirrored Reflection” — Cliff wall mirrored on the surface of a rockbound alpine lake in Sequoia National Park.
There’s a story and a lesson associated with this photograph. Explaining may take a bit more than the usual two paragraphs. (It takes five. I urge/invite you to click through and read the whole thing — and I’ll be interested in your comments.) I’ll start with the subject though. Years ago (I’ll reveal how many years below) I was on a trans-Sierra pack trip of over a week’s length with a group of backcountry friends. I had walked this route years before this trip, and there were a few places that I specifically wanted to photograph again, especially this lake. I stopped there long enough to make a few careful photographs, including one of my favorites. (That one also comes with a bit of a story and lesson.)
The High Sierra Trail on the approach to Kaweah Gap, Sequoia National Park.
There are some backcountry adventures in my future this summer. One involves setting up a Sierra backcountry basecamp for some serious wilderness photography. Another is a shorter trip with a group of friends that I’ve joined for backpack trips for decades — since before 1990. One way I get myself in the right frame of mind for these trips is by revisiting earlier adventures. Recently I’ve been looking over a collection of photographs from a major trip that I did with the latter group a decade-and-a-half ago. This photograph comes from that trek.
Back then we managed a few quite long trips — up to a couple of weeks. This trip lasted about a week and a half as we backpacked the High Sierra Trail from west to east, concluding with a Mt. Whitney ascent before exiting at Whitney Portal. There’s some significant up and down on the route — it crosses the rugged Kaweah range, drops deep into Kern Canyon, and then climbs again to cross Whitney Trail Crest. This photograph is from the spectacular climb toward Kaweah Gap from the west. (If you look very closely you may be able to spot one of my fellow hikers.)
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, Amazon, and directly from G Dan Mitchell.
The High Sierra Trail crosses alpine terrain near Kaweah Gap
I have been reviewing my older archives of raw files recently, partly because it simply is important to do so from time to time, and partly because I’m between locations and looking for additional images to work on. Any time I go back through the older files I find things that are interesting, and occasionally I even find some excellent photographs that I overlooked the first time around.
This photograph comes from 2008. To me it seems more interesting as a record of a particular place and a particular event than on a purely photographic basis. (I could have wished for a more interesting sky!) This was my second crossing of the High Sierra Trail, which we followed from the west side of Sequoia National Park, across the entire range, to the summit of Mount Whitney, and then down to Whitney Portal. On this trip I traveled with a group of long-time backcountry friends… unlike the first time I did this trip perhaps 25 years earlier, when I did it with my wife. I made this photograph from the top of Kaweah Gap, the pass through the Great Western Divide before dropping into Big Arroyo. The photograph looks back to the west, across the trail we had ascended to reach this point.
“The Kaweahs” — Ridge and Waterfall in the Kaweah Range near Kaweah Gap
This photograph comes from the High Sierra Trail, an east-west route across the Sierra between the west slopes of Sequoia National Park and Mount Whitney on the eastern Sierra crest. (Although it is technically not part of the High Sierra Trail, I regard the final ascent to Whitney on a lateral trail and the descent from the crest to Whitney Portal to be part of the route.) The north-south John Muir Trail is better known, and the High Sierra Trail is not as popular — though in many ways it is the same league. It covers an extraordinary route, climbing from the forested and gradually-rising west side slopes up the immense canyon of the Kaweah River, crossing Kaweah Gap in spectacular fashion, and descending Big Arroyo to the grand canyon of the Kern River, which if follows north to Junction Meadow before ascending once again to join the John Muir Trail heading south and then climb to Whitney Trail crest.
The trail up into the Kaweahs is stunning, with remarkably rugged and alpine scenery on the ascent from the west. It is, frankly, as impressive as anything else in the range. This section climbs the cirque above a popular lake destination, rising on a trail that follows an improbably route high into the mountains in the photograph before turning to cross Kaweah Gap after passing through a garden of small meadows and rocky tarns.
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” from Heyday Books, is available directly from G Dan Mitchell.
