An early autumn snow storm obscures the view of pines, aspens and other fall foliage in the eastern Sierra Nevada
This photograph, like a few others I have posted this fall, was made on an early October day when we drove across the Sierra from west to east during the first “real” snow of the season. Our goal was Bishop, California, since we planned to photograph autumn aspen color on the “east side” for a few days. Since the usual more direct route over Tioga Pass was closed due to snow, we ended up crossing all the way up close to Tahoe over Carson and then Monitor Passes to get to highway 395, which we then followed southwards along the east side of the Sierra.
The snow began before we reached Carson pass, and though it never fell very heavily, it more or less continued for the rest of the drive, only stopping shortly before we got to Bishop. This was quite a contrast to the weather we had been having, which had been up into the low 90s in our part of California only a few days earlier! Since we had the whole day to get to Bishop we made frequent stops and detours along the way, giving us lots of opportunities to photograph scenes that had a distinctly winter-like appearance. One place we paused was along a high point on highway 395 just north of Lee Vining, where huge groves of colorful aspen trees were just visible through the blowing snow. Turning slightly away from the aspen color, I chose to make a few isolated evergreen trees the focus of this photograph.
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. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Hazy morning light filters across the burned hillsides in the area of the Rim Fire, California
In photographic terms this is perhaps not the most spectacular photograph, and the location is not quite a scenic icon – though it is a place that many stop and take a look on their way to Yosemite, the “Rim of the World” overlook along highway 120 between Groveland and the northern park entrance. However, this view is loaded with implications and connected to many stories.
Late this past summer, the state of California was tremendously dry after a second drought season. It wasn’t a question of whether there would be big wildfires, but more of where, when, and how many. Perhaps the biggest one of all started very near the Rim of the World overlook, and in the hot and dry conditions it quickly – some might say explosively – spread to the north, east, and south. While many think of it as “the Yosemite fire” – and it did burn a lot of terrain inside the park – it really was more of a “Yosemite area” fire. Because of the conditions – the long-term conditions of drought and the immediate conditions of heat and wind – the fire apparently did very serious damage to the forests in the are.
Shortly after the fire was contained, I thought that I might drive through the park on Tioga Pass Road to get to and from the eastern Sierra in early October. In fact, the roads had opened up again by that time, but snow closed Tioga Pass on my trip to the west and we ended up coming back over Sonora Pass. So the post-fire conditions of this area, which is very familiar to me after years of visits, were still an unknown when I drove to The Valley on October 30 for a few days of autumn photography. Passing into the first fringes of the burned areas along highway 120 things didn’t look all that different than they do after any wildfire – some areas badly burned, some singed, and others that mostly escaped the fire. I decided to stop at the Rim of the World overlook, which was pretty much the only place where stopping was allowed, and get out and take a look. I was floored by the scale of the fire. It had come from behind my position, burned down and across the deep canyon of the Tuolumne River, up the canyon walls on the far side, and then across a vast series of receding ridges. Some smoke and haze still seemed to be coming from the area, and early morning light glanced across the ridges, with their dead trees. In the far distance there is a low peak with a bit of early season snow.
I have seen quite a few fires in the park over the past few decades. One not far from here destroyed a large area of forest a few decades ago – and on this trip, ironically, I was noting that new evergreen trees are finally taking hold there. Later several very bad fires blew up from near Foresta, doing terrible damage to the section of Crane Flat Road descending towards The Valley. There have been others. In most of these cases – though I wondered in the case of the most recent Foresta fire, too – it seemed that I could watch the forest recover and return to something resembling what I remember. However, given the intensity and scale of this fire, I wonder if I’ll have that opportunity where the Rim Fire burned?
To end on a cheerier note, a couple of other observations. Even near badly burned areas, I did see sections where this fire only burned some of the vegetation and a few that seemed to have been completely spared. And when I got to a spot inside the park along highway 120 where I often stop to photography dogwood trees in the spring and fall, a spot that seemed like it might have been within the burn zone on the maps, I found my little spot completely intact, with the dogwoods turning to fall colors.
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. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Peak autumn color in a small stand of aspens high in a desert mountain range east of the Sierra Nevada
It is no secret that I love aspen trees, especially in the fall, and that I’m a big fan of the aspens along the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada. I photograph them every year, and I have come to know quite a bit about where to find them and how to photograph them in a variety of conditions ranging from sun to clouds and rain to snow. The aspens in this photo are also in California… but just not in the Sierra.
For a while I’ve had the idea to photograph aspens that are east of the range, since I have seen them from time to time while out there, but usually at the “wrong” time of year. This year I had a chance to make such trees the target of some travel, and we went looking for them east of the Sierra between roughly Long Valley and Bridgeport or thereabouts. The specific location of these trees is not all that important, though I’ll say that we came across this stand in some mountains east of the Sierra – as we rounded a bend and dropped into a valley in mostly sagebrush and juniper country, the stunning color of this grove along a small stream bed provided a vivid contrast with the surrounding terrain. We stopped and wandered around the edges of the grove, mostly making photographs of the trees themselves rather than their larger setting. Sierra fall aspen photographers are (sometimes painfully) aware of the ways that aspen leaves can deteriorate in the autumn, including brown or black spotted leaves or trees that go straight to drab dead leaves without passing through a colorful stage. However, the leaves on these trees were among the most perfect I have seen, with barely a blemish and with intense colors covering the spectrum from barely green though golden and on towards orange and red.
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. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Colorful autumn trees among burned forest and reflected in the water of the Merced River, Yosemite Valley
This is, in several ways, a “quieter” photograph than some that I have posted recently. The location is along a section of the Merced River in Yosemite Valley that is probably not really seen by more than a handful of people, if that, on any given day.The spot is not special enough, if specialness is definable, to warrant its own particular name. (However, a few people do have a name for it – but it isn’t really to be shared here.) So the scene itself was, objectively speaking, quiet – the only others around were a couple of photographer friends working individually nearby, there was no wind, the river was as calm and quiet as I recall seeing it – barely even flowing, and almost nothing was moving in the forests along its banks.
There was another kind of quiet, too – the mental quiet that I often look for while photographing, especially in places like this. It is easy to let my mind wander – is this the right place to stop? should I check email before leaving the car? is there anything here that will make a great photograph? might it be easier to shoot someplace more predictably beautiful? what if I can’t find anything to shoot? Leaving my car behind and shouldering my tripod and bag of gear, I walked down to the river bank and began looking. My notions about what I might photograph are not so important – being open to what I might find to photograph is. When you first begin to photograph, it can sometimes take a long time to get into the frame of mind that allows you to slow down and become engrossed by what you see, to the point that you lose track of time and even where you are, focusing entirely on the seeing and the photographing. Eventually, I think you can learn to let this happen more quickly – not that it always does – and to avoid the trap of trying too hard to steer the process and to instead be quiet and open to what you see. And so, thinking back on this evening, as I made my last photographs before heading home, I recall the sense of quiet focus as much as the objective features of the scene itself.
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. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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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.
