Tag Archives: ridge

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: Yosemite

Morning Reflection, Granite Ridge

December 11, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Morning light on shattered granite ridge reflected in a subalpine Lake

This is another older photograph, made on a late-season solo backpacking trip into the Yosemite backcountry back in 2010 for the purpose of making photographs. This time of year is my favorite in the High Sierra — beautiful weather, fewer visitors, no mosquitos, lovely light. In addition, and perhaps related to some of those other factors, this time of year seems slower and more relaxed.

I hiked in to this group of lakes on the first day, setting up camp late in the day. Over the course of several days I explored this lake carefully and also visited two higher lakes in this group, along with some surrounding high country. I’ve been to this place enough times now that I’ve begun to know its ins and outs, including alternate routes between places, the best times for particular sorts of light and so forth. I made this photograph in the early morning, while on a walk around the edge of the lake. The light was softened by some high clouds, and the surface of the lake was still mirror smooth.

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

Timberline Lake, Rugged Ridges

December 8, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A small timberline lake sits on a bench in front of rugged summits of the Great Western Divide

This is yet another in series of photographs from a 2010 backpack trip into the far reaches of the Kern River drainage in Sequoia National Park. For reasons that I’m not certain that I can identify, last week I decided to go back and take a look at these old photographs, few of which have not previously shared. They exemplify one of the reasons that I rarely delete old raw files, even if they don’t look all that interesting at the time — too often I return to the photographs months or even years later and find things that make me glad I kept them. Sometimes I find photographs that I simply passed over or didn’t understand at the time, and other times I simply have the joy of reliving an experience that had largely slipped from my mind.

On this trip a group of close friends with whom I have backpacked for years were on yet another summer adventure, this time into the remote backcountry of Sequoia National Park. We traveled a popular but long trail over several very high passes to get to the general area, and then we left that trail and headed west to a place that is visited much less frequently, a location tucked back up beneath the Great Western Divide. I had touched the edges of this area a few times before but never had gone straight there — and now I wish that I had visited earlier, as we found an infrequently visited region of monumental mountains and valleys and a stupendous alpine setting. This photograph overlooks a lake on a bench in an area where we camped, and the view extends westward toward the crest of the divide.

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.

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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: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Sunrise, Capitol Reef

November 12, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Dawn clouds about the peaks of Capitol Reef National Park

Finding sunrise light like this is a matter of getting up very early, making some decent pre-dawn guesses about what may happen later, finding a good location… and a whole bunch of plain dumb luck. Oh, and persistence helps, too — if you are out there a lot you will inevitably increase the odds that you’ll encounter the very special light. But no one can call up a small cloud centered above a ridge lit by first light that also turns the distant clouds shades of pink and purple.

Our primary plan on this day was to take a rather long drive down the east side of the park, though the ultimate goal was a bit fuzzy — it could have been a slot canyon I know of or it could have been a higher location that I had visited before. We started out in near darkness from our campsite, crossed the park, and then started south. As dawn approached, it was immediately obvious that the sky was just about to do something amazing, so we quickly found a spot with a panoramic view in most directions, stopped the car, grabbed cameras and tripods, and hurried to find compositions that might make use of this light. Since most of the interesting geological features seemed to be a good ways off, I put a very long lens on my camera and focused on small distant details. For a very brief moment, just as the first light began to gently wash over the high peaks of Capitol Reef, this intense color came to the clouds and one small cloud became visible against the lighter background.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: ridge

Morning Reflection, Granite Ridge

Timberline Lake, Rugged Ridges

Great Western Divide

Sunrise, Capitol Reef

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