Tag Archives: national park

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

Three Backpackers, Alpine Terrain

December 6, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Three backpackers hiking above timberline in the Southern Sierra Nevada wilderness, approach an alpine lake

This photograph is a bit unusual for me to share in that it isn’t particularly about the image as a photograph but more about the photograph as a record of a place and a time. It comes from a backpacking trip with friends into a remote section of my favorite part of the Sierra Nevada, the high and wild areas of the Southern Sierra within and around the Kern River’s upper drainage. This is an area that is not easily accessible — certainly not a lightweight weekend trip! — and where the terrain is unlike that elsewhere in the range. There is a huge and very high elevation plateau here, at or above timberline, with expansive views to multiple surrounding ranges, all of which feature peaks reaching to and above the 13,000′ to 14,000′ range. Any access route requires a long walk or passage over very difficult terrain, and sometimes involves both.

We entered the area by way of two high passes, one of which is over 13,000′ high, dropped onto the plateau, and walked to a favorite timberline camping location by a stream. (We would follow this stream up to the crest to exit via another high and difficult pass a few days later.) From here we left the main route and headed off into an area that none of us has visited before, an area with few trails and few visitors. This photograph evokes, for me at least, a number of sensations and recollections: what it is like to pass over difficult and nearly trail-less country with a group of like-minded friends, the sense of vast space in these open and rugged places, and the freeing feeling of passing over this country into places that I have not previously visited. Such high, open, rugged terrain is not for everyone — but I love it!

Our group has been into this area several times, and over a period of decades I had passed though many times.

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

Great Western Divide

December 6, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Sierra Nevada backcountry near the Great Western Divide

The back story to this photograph could end up being quite long, but I’ll try to constrain it a bit. First, credit to my friend David Hoffman, whose recent effort to share a bunch of his black and white photographs has inspired me to share a few of mine that haven’t been public before, and to go back to some older images that have languished in my raw file archives and do the work necessary to bring them to the light of day. This is one of those photograph, from a trip into a wonderful and remote section of the Southern Sierra that I undertook with group of friends over four years ago. The general area is one that I had long wanted to visit, since a strange college backpacking trip that had one of the lakes in the area as its objective, but which was derailed when my buddies and I realized that we were not up the rather intense trip we had embarked upon, and we ended up revising our trip in mid-stream — and we ended up many miles away from here. On this 2010 trip, many decades later, I finally got into this area that I had thought about during the intervening years.

The actual target destination on this 2010 trip was a particular alpine lake that I had been curious about since that original visit. We did go to that lake, a high barren lake above timberline, on this trip. Ironically, that destination from so many years ago did not particularly excite me when we got there — we stayed briefly and then moved on. But the place we ended up after that was very special. We looped into an area far up in the upper drainage of the Kern River, a location that is off the beaten track and clearly not visited that often. Our campsite near the location of this photograph showed virtually no signs of previous visits, a rare thing in the Sierra. This beautiful landscape of timberline lakes and meadows, perhaps my favorite sort of Sierra place, sits at the base of huge alpine canyons leading to massive and rugged summits. Fortunately, its remoteness and the difficulty of the approach is likely to sustain the solitude of the place.

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

Desert Dawn, Storm Clouds

June 22, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 6 Comments

Layers of dawn clouds from an arriving storm above receding mountains and valleys, Death Valley

This photograph comes from just about two months ago, during a photography visit to Death Valley National Park. It has been a very strange weather year in California, and the strangeness continued on this trip. In early April, almost anything can happen with Death Valley weather… and much of that “anything” occurred while we were there. On this day, the main attractions was… snow!

The night before I had decided that it looked like there might be the potential for interesting light up high in the mountains to the west of the Valley. My hope was that the clouds of an incoming weather front my just be making their appearance over the mountains, but leaving the sky to the east mostly clear or perhaps with some interesting clouds around dawn. We were up well before first light and on the road. As it began to be light we could see that there were a lot of clouds coming in, and when we arrived at our intended shooting location the clouds were closing in quickly. I guessed that there might, just maybe, be a brief window of light as the sun rose above mountains on the far side of the valley and, for an instant, might shine light horizontally above the mountains and below the clouds. It didn’t quite happen. (And you can’t always count on the good light. You have to be out there in some light failures if you hope to be there enough to get the miraculous successes, too.) The best we got was a brief and fiery illumination of the undersides of these clouds, above darker lower clouds and the shadowed peaks of the Amargosa Range.

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

Granite, Falling Water

May 31, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A spring creek cascades across dark fractured granite, Yosemite National Park

Yosemite’s Tioga Pass Road (Highway 120), which passes through the park and across the Sierra crest at Tioga Pass, opened earlier than usual this year. It was not the earliest recorded opening, but the very small snow pack of the winter season meant that in early May it looked much more like a typical June. There was some snow left on the ground, but rather than being the deep and compacted remains of months of winter snow it was mostly what was left from a single spring storm a few days earlier.

In a more typical year, a drive over this route on the opening weekend provides an experience that is, to my way of thinking, mostly about water. Not only do we get to see vast remaining snow banks holding water that will irrigate the Sierra for months to come, but the spring melt brings wild, watery scenes nearly everywhere. Waterfalls and creeks appear in places where there is almost no evidence of their existence weeks or months later. Creeks spill across the highway flood sections of it. Larger creeks and rivers overflow their banks and turn meadows into lakes. But not this year. The photograph features a small section of a larger cascade which bounces down a steep and rugged section of granite boulders. Beautiful as it is, it should look like this in late June rather than early May.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: national park

Three Backpackers, Alpine Terrain

Great Western Divide

Desert Dawn, Storm Clouds

Granite, Falling Water

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