“Panamint Valley” — View across Rainbow Canyon toward the flats of Panamint Valley.
Death Valley National Park is a huge landscape, in more ways that one. The park is huge. It is the largest park in the contiguous states. (Alaska, where everything is on a larger scale, has four larger parks.) Within the park we often are able to view huge distances — in fact, Death Valley’s visual scale reminds me of places I’ve seen in Alaska. Here we look down Rainbow Canyon and across the entire Panamint Valley (one valley west of Death Valley itself) toward more desert mountains.
Rocky terrain and its reflection along the shoreline of a backcountry subalpine lake, Kings Canyon National Park.
As I do from time to time, recently I was reminiscing about the Before Times when I headed into the Sierra backcountry for a week or more every summer with a wonderful group of fellow photographers — among whom are several who have been doing these trips for two decades. (Although I’ve visited the Sierra backcountry for what I vaguely refer to as “decades,” I only began to join this group in 2008.) All of us miss these trips, especially what would have been the one celebrating the second decade of the work, but it turns out that there are still discoveries to be made among the photographs we brought back.
On this trip we visited a fairly remote location in the Sequoia-Kings Canyon backcountry, one that took us a couple of days to get to. Once there we spent close to a week photographing the heck out of the place and surrounding wilderness, a high elevation place full of lakes and rocky terrain. We mixed photograph in our immediate “backyard” (sometimes only steps from out tents) with somewhat longer explorations. This photograph comes from a lake rather close to our camp. My weak knowledge of Sierra geology suggests to me that this monumental chunk of rock was probably overrun and sculpted by glaciers in the past.
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.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
Manage Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behavior or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
