Tag Archives: hike

Photographs: Central California, Photographs: Nature

High Peaks Trail

Image Leave a comment
High Peaks Trail
The High Peaks trail passes trees and cliffs, Pinnacles National Park

High Peaks Trail. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

The High Peaks trail passes trees and cliffs, Pinnacles National Park.

This trail and this park have a special place in my California outdoor experience. I’ve live in the state since I was four-years-old and my parents moved here from Minnesota. From the earliest I can remember my family visited a bunch of outdoor locations in the Northern and Central California area, and I always regarded a trip to Pinnacles National Park (then Monument) as a special treat. It seemed like a very long drive to the east side entrance, and once we got there a visit to the caves was always the highlight. But we also took longer hikes, including memorable walks up to and across the “high peaks.” I continued to visit over the intervening years, but I’ll save a few of those experiences for another post.

The Pinnacles get their name from the striking rocky outcroppings found in the park. In the “high peaks” area they literally sit on the summit ridge, but they are found elsewhere in other settings, including the walls of some small, deep canyons. The trail mostly crossed familiar chaparral terrain, but here it passes beneath some impressively large rock faces and under the branches of some trees with new spring growth.

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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

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

Hikers, Desert Canyon

Image Leave a comment
Hikers, Desert Canyon
Two hikers entering the narrows of Titus Canyon

Hikers, Desert Canyon. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Two hikers entering the narrows of Titus Canyon.

The stream beds of desert washes often seem to me to be the “freeways” of the desert. They can (but not always!) provide relatively easy walking through rougher terrain. The periodic flow of water, along with the mud and rocks caught in its flow, both clears the washes of vegetation and leaves a relatively flat surface of small stones and dried sediment. Over millennia the water flowing through the washes does the hard word of trail building, wearing down obstructions and leveling out the rough places. (OK, there are exceptions — those chock stones that fall into canyons and block them, along with the periodic “dry falls” that may be unsurmountable.)

This canyon is often used by motor vehicle traffic, but following heavy rains that made the route impassable to vehicles it turned into a much more pleasant place to hike, and a group of us walked up through the spectacular narrows in its lower reaches. Lower in the canyon it is sometimes quite narrow, though in this location it begins to broaden a bit. To understand the scale of the terrain look closely and you’ll be able to spot a couple of 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 and Amazon.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: People In Landscape, Photographs: Southern California

Two Hikers, Titus Canyon

Image Leave a comment
Two Hikers, Titus Canyon
Two hikers descending the narrows of Titus Canyon

Two Hikers, Titus Canyon. © Copyright 2019 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Two hikers descending the narrows of Titus Canyon.

Earlier this month I visited Death Valley National Park for a few days. I go there and photograph at least once each year — I’ve been visiting for a couple of decades and photographing the place seriously for about fifteen years. I often point out that there are few places where the effects of water are more obvious than in this unlikely location. Almost all features of the park are formed or sculpted by water, and these effects are very visible in the early bare desert landscape. I arrived only a day after extremely heavy rains, and the evidence was everywhere — flooded sections of roadway, wet and muddy washes, dunes that were still damp, large shallow lakes on playas.

Many park roads were closes, including the long dirt road through Titus Canyon. The road starts high in Amargosa Canyon, crosses the mountains, descends toward the Valley, and near the end passes through a section of very narrow canyon. Normally there is enough traffic there to interrupt the reverie of hikers, but the road was closed to vehicle traffic and we (some members of my family) and I enjoyed a long and quiet hike up the canyon. Here two hikers (my sister and her husband) are descending though one of the deeper and narrower sections of the canyon.

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.

Blog | About | Flickr | Facebook | Email

Links to Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Rock-Filled Tarn

Leave a comment

Rock-Filled Tarn
Tarn on Chagoopa Plateau

Rock-Filled Tarn. © Copyright 2018 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Tarn on Chagoopa Plateau

This photograph is a decade old, though it has sat in my raw file archive for that entire period. As we hiked through this area on a trans-Sierra pack trip via the High Sierra trail we crossed the edge of this remarkable seasonable lake, nearly filled with a pavement of broken rocks. The location is fairly remote — essentially more or less half way between the west-side sequoia groves and Mount Whitney on the east side.

When I originally looked at this file after the trip, something appealed to me about it but I could never quite figure out how to post-process it. (I won’t go into details here, but I was using an older version of digital photography technology, and the light was a bit unusual in this location.) I never did come up with a color rendition of the scene that pleased me. Finally, a decade later, it dawned on me that it might work as a monochrome image, both because of the strong shapes of the foreground rocks and because black and white permits more modification and control during the post-processing (what used to be called the darkroom) phase.

See top of this page for Articles, Sales and Licensing, my Sierra Nevada Fall Color book, Contact Information and more.

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.
Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Email

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.