Runoff from spring snow melt rushes over boulders of Cascade Creek, Yosemite National Park.
This is a subject that I return to several times each year – a particular section of creek that can be viewed from overhead and which can vary from nearly dry to a wild torrent depending upon the time of year and the character of each new year. During the past year I was inspired by Charles Cramer’s stunning photograph of this subject to look at it more closely and from some different perspectives. (A small bit of “Charlie’s scene” appears in this photograph. I wonder if you can find it? :-)
In some ways, the view of this scene is limited in that you can only see it from a particular range of positions – unless you have the skill of levitation! In another way it is hardly limiting at all since the larger view contains many possible smaller views of rocks and plants and water and light. I still have in mind a horizontal composition in this general area, but so far it hasn’t quite worked. Guess I’ll have to keep trying.
I made this photograph in the morning before any direct light had worked its way around the mountains and down into the stream bed. Beyond the stream, which drops precipitously into the Merced River far below, there was open sky and that is the light that reflects on some of the wet rocks. By playing around to find an appropriate combination of ISO values, aperture, and shutter speed, I tried to get the water to hold some detail but to also be blurred enough to reflect its wild motion as it tumbles down this rocky canyon.
As is sometimes the case, I still cannot decide for sure between this monochrome version and a color version that will appear here before long.
The Merced River overflows its banks during the spring runoff and floods surrounding meadows and lowlands in Yosemite Valley.
I’m tempted to go on about how the spring runoff is my favorite time of year in Yosemite Valley – but I’ve probably already written about how autumn is my favorite time, or how much I love winter in the Valley, and… :-)
In any case, there is a lot to like about spring in Yosemite Valley. For example, seasonal waterfalls that many visitors never see come to life. I believe that the thin fall across the Valley in this photograph is Sentinel Fall. There is another small one to its right in the v-shaped gully, but I do not know its name. The meadows come back to life and the trees begin to get their leaves, and there is green everywhere. Especially in a heavy snowfall year like this one, the Merced River rises as the snow begins to melt, and riverbanks overflow and meadows flood – as is happening in this photograph of a section of the river near Leidig Meadow along the north side of the Valley.
I’m surprised that there are not more photographs produced in this part of the Valley. I suppose the explanation may include the fact that few of the main iconic sights are directly visible from here, the current prohibition against parking along the road in this area, and the fact that parts of the river trail were underwater. But in the right light – which here can occur at times other than the typical early/late hours – Leidig Meadow and this curving section of the river with its shoreline trees can be very appealing, especially when the far canyon wall is muted by shadows.
I shot this a bit later in the day, not during the typical “golden hour” times at all. To get here I drove past this section of the road and walked back, alternately walking along the roadway (and occasionally leaving the narrow road as cars approached) and following the trail where it was not submerged. To make this photograph I walked down to the very edge of the rising Merced River and managed to find one spot that wasn’t too muddy.
A flock of snow geese against the partly cloudy winter sky above the Merced National Wildlife Reserve, California.
Yes, yet another in the series of photographs of migratory birds above the Merced National Wildlife Reserve made on a winter evening in February. While I missed the “fly in” (though saw it happening a ways north of my position) I did watch hundreds and hundreds of birds of all types pass overhead. Every time I would start to wonder “where are the birds?” or worry about whether I would miss the fly in, another flock would appear and traverse the sky above me.
It was my good fortune – certainly little careful planning was involved! – to be out here during a brief evening window of interesting light and sky as a storm cleared. In fact, as I drove towards the Refuge I at first thought that some of the larger clouds to the west might block the evening light or even bring a bit of rain. However, as sunset approached the clouds continued to thin and I ended up with a beautiful sky full of broken clouds that were gently illuminated as the day ended.
UPDATE: As of 2020 I am no longer posting annual updates concerning this subject — and I am editing older posts on the subject in light of the need to be more responsible about not encouraging the onslaught. I also no longer recommend going to the Valley to see it. Unfortunately, too much exposure (yes, I played a part in it, unfortunately) has led to absurd crowds, traffic jams, littering, destruction of areas in the Valley where too many people go to see it… and the park has increasingly — and appropriately — cracked down. Parking options have been eliminated, at least one viewing location has been closed. Good news! The rest of Yosemite Valley is still there and often exceptionally beautiful at this time of year.
I recall first becoming aware of Galen Rowell’s famous photograph of Yosemite’s Horsetail Fall (the “natural fire fall”) many years ago, quite possibly as it appears on page 25 of my 1979 edition of his book “High and Wild” ( Sierra Club Books) which I probably picked up when I worked in a bookstore for several years. (Each bookstore employee had a shelf in a back room where we put aside books until we could afford them. My shelf often held books of photography including large format books of landscape photography. I still have original copies of several of the well-known Ansel Adams books in new condition, but that is a story for another post perhaps.) I am sure that I saw the photograph again from time to time, and the story of its creation is now well known. Of course, I did not really know then where the fall was, other than “somewhere in Yosemite Valley,” nor did I know when the purportedly brief appearance of the fall occurred each year. It was a mystery, almost a myth, and it seemed like something that only a few privileged people had been able to see.
Although I’ve visited the Valley for decades — long enough that I remember watching the unnatural fire fall being pushed over the edge of Glacier Point when I was a child – I had never really tried to find Horsetail Fall, much less photograph it. Truth be told, some decades ago I actually avoided the Valley for a number of years, with the exception of a time when I did a bit of climbing, since I preferred the high country of the park and elsewhere in the Sierra to the crowds and traffic in the Valley.
A few years ago – and a bit before the current insane craze for photographing the thing – I read more about Horsetail and finally got the urge to photograph it. I think back to a February day when Northside Drive was closed for a period of major road work. It had snowed in the Valley and the only way to get over to the El Capitan picnic area was to park on Southside drive, load up a pack with camera gear, and walk the cross-valley road in the snow. Since it was my first attempt to photograph the fall, I walked across early. Having plenty of time, I turned west on Northside and wandered in a snow-covered El Capitan Meadow completely alone — no cars and, to the best of my memory, not another person. After spending perhaps an hour alone photographing the oak-filled meadow in the late afternoon, I walked back to the east and wandered up to the picnic area where a handful of other photographers were getting set up. I looked up and thought, “Oh, that’s Horsetail,” and then made some credible but fairly conventional photographs of the sight as the sunset light came on.
Horsetail Fall, Sunset (#2)
I returned to photograph Horsetail a few more times, on occasion making this the main goal of winter visits to the Valley. I explored the surroundings near the picnic area more thoroughly, and found more nearby areas to shoot from that created some variations in perspective. I joined the growing throng at a more accessible spot and there figured out that the fall could be photographed from more than precisely one location. Before I was done I created a few photographs of the subject that I like. (I don’t mean to imply that I was always successful. On one “memorable” evening I set up and watched as the sunset light began to glow and focus itself on the fall. It was just about to reach its peak… when someone hit the “off switch” and everything went gray as the setting sun dropped behind clouds far to the west.)
Over the past couple of years more and more people have shown up for Horsetail. It might seem odd that few others photographed it for so many decades after Rowell made his iconic image, and that then many suddenly began to try to do so. But a couple of things changed. First, the advent of digital photography and DSLRs has radically increased the number of photographers out and about and searching for things to photograph. There have long been many people with cameras in the Valley, but it sometimes has seemed to become a bit crazy in recent years. Secondly, and not entirely unrelated, the Internet has made it much easier to share information about such things as Horsetail and, even more so, to quickly update people on what is happening right now with certain photographic subjects. I think this has encouraged photographers whose time is limited and who want to “get that shot” as quickly as possible to be ready to drop everything and head out now if they hear that conditions will be promising.
And the crowds certainly do show up! A few years ago I drove to a viewing area area one February day — the road was open once again — to find a parking lot completely full and then some. Photographers were set up tripod-to-tripod and scattered in nearby forest and meadows. One evening I decided to try the other location again, and having caught on to what was happening I arrived quite early… to find that photographers were already staking out their spots hours ahead of time. I found a spot up a hill a ways in some trees, and waited… as scores of photographers began to show up and point their lenses in the same direction.
Unfortunately, the problem has continued to spiral out of control, with newspaper and magazine articles and breathless social media posts amping the thing up beyond all reason… and beyond the park’s ability to withstand the onslaught. In places where a dozen or two folks used to show up on a busy night, the crowds doubled, then doubled again, then reached into the hundreds and now into the thousands. Traffic jams ensued, huge crowds assembled in fragile meadows, forests, and river bank areas, trampling down vegetation and soil and leaving litter behind. The park service had no choice but to (wisely) institute restrictions, and as of 2020 access has been made much more difficult and limited and one of the two popular areas has been closed entirely.
That lovely, mythical, magical experience of a decade or more ago no longer exists. I urge readers to forego this one. The Valley is still utterly beautiful at this time of year, but go elsewhere and photograph its other wonderful features. Don’t be part of the out of control horde…
Horsetail Fall, Sunset (#3)
Photographically, the subject has become less and less appealing to me. I’ll photograph an “icon” in more or less a couple circumstances. First, I’ll do it if I don’t already have a decent image of the icon in question. Once I have an effective image I’ll often stay away unless there is something extra special about the conditions or unless I can find a new or different perspective on the subject or unless I’m working to refine a way of photographing it that I have worked on previously. It is hard, I think, to attempt this with Horsetail. The number of locations from which it is photographed is rather limited. Most photographs are made more or less from two basic locations, with slight variations. And while weather conditions can vary a lot in the Valley, the range of conditions that will still permit the sunset light to hit the fall and be photographed is very limited.
In the end, even very good photographs of the fall tend to look quite a bit like other very good photographs of the fall, mostly varying only a bit. Although I’ve recently seen many competent and well-made photographs of the fall… I’ve only seen one that was truly original. (I’m not going to identify it here since if I don’t want to encourage the next crowd to start coming out to try to recreate that image! :-)
So, I didn’t go this year. I was in Death Valley at about the time that the light started, and I spent time doing night photography on a later weekend when I might have gone.
I think I prefer to remember that evening a few years ago when I walked across the Valley in snow, spent an hour alone in El Capitan Meadow before walking to the picnic area, photographed Horsetail in the quiet with a small number of other photographers, and then walked back across the Valley in the peaceful darkness of the early evening.
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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