“Lakes Meadows, and Trees” — Trees and shorelines along a series of Sierra Nevada lakes.
This is another photograph from my mid-July backpack trip into the Eastern Sierra Nevada, right below the crest of the range just outside Yosemite National Park. We spent three nights and four days in the area, and because it was an easy trip with low mileage, I had plenty of time to photograph morning and evening. This is an early morning photograph of a series of lakes, captured while my trail companions were still in their tents.
The area presented some unusual terrain. Our trip began at the lower end of the lake that is barely visible in the far distance, so the first few miles of walking were nearly level. From the end of that lake we climbed no more than perhaps fifty more feet to the middle lake and our campsite. Talk about easy walking! The water in the foreground belongs to a small pond that was less than a one minute walk from my campsite.
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A stream curves past forest and towards Sierra Nevada crest peaks in late summer.
The question of how to categorize this photograph (as I do with all o them at my website) perplexed me a bit. Although I was set up outside of Yosemite National Park, the two prominent peaks are within its boundaries. And do I call this a “fall color photograph?” The trees don’t suggest doing so, but the slight yellow on the willows and the lovely golden brown on the hillside signal this season. Categorization questions aside, this was a beautiful late-summer Sierra day, one of sunshine and light – between two days of rain, hail, and even some snow.
It is hard to know how many times I have passed this location over the years — ok, over the decades. But I have typically been here while on the way to someplace else, and while I’ve noticed it in passing I don’t recall stopping to photograph it before. This time I wasn’t in a hurry, and I had no other destination in mind — so I went slow and pulled over a few times to make photographs along this creek.
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.
Wildflowers grow along a creek draining past the trail around Saddlebag Lake
I have hiked around this lake, located just east of the Sierra crest near Tioga Pass, a number of times in the pass. My first visit to the area was quite a few years ago, when a friend and I did a short mid-October pack trip to access a basin full of small lakes beyond. We ended up here because it was past the October 15 cutoff for overnight parking along Tioga Pass Road, and our reward was a beautiful late-season trip that featured snow flurries as we began hiking and through the night, and beautiful post-front light the following day.
This time the adventure was much more tame. I arose before dawn and got there in time to start hiking at about sunrise. I had the shoreline trail entirely to myself as I walked to the far end of the lake, where I planned to explore a bit and photograph some lakes and ridges. Partway through the hike a small creek drained across the trail on its way down to the lake, and here the moisture supported a colorful crop of lush plants and wildflowers, many at the peak of their blooming cycle. I stopped, set up camera and tripod, and photographed them with a bit of the lake’s surface reflecting the blue sky and the summit North Peak.
Early morning light on Greenstone Lake and surrounding trees and rocky terrain.
Greenstone is a relatively small lake just beyond the upper end of Saddlebag Lake, which is itself located just east of the Sierra crest and Yosemite National Park in an area dominated by Mount Conness and the tall ridge on which it stands. I had arrived before dawn at the Saddlebag Lake parking lot so that I could be on the trail before sunrise. Rather than giving in to the temptation to pay for a “water taxi” ride to the other end of the lake, I took the trail along the left shore, and arrived at Greenstone Lake just about the time that the first direct light was making its way down to this lake and the surrounding rocky hillside.
In this wet year with its late arrival of summer conditions, everything was still very wet around the lake and the meadow plants were still green and growing. (In dry years they start to finish up their growth spurt and begin turning brown by this time.)
I think this lake is a bit tricky to photograph in morning light. The light could be lovely at sunrise, but it would still be well up on the high ridges above the lake. It takes a long time for the sun to get high enough to rise above the ridge leading to Tioga Peak, and by that time most of the early morning warm light quality has given way to more typical daytime light. There were a few challenges in this photograph. They included trying to figure out how to find a workable composition in such a complex scene that was made even more complex by the reflections in the water. I think the triangle of rocky terrain in the upper half of the frame may help with this. The light posed several problems, mainly related to the very large dynamic range between the bright rocks and the shaded areas of forest at upper right. The light color was also tricky – because the shadows tend to be much bluer in a photograph than your eyes register when you are there, I had to mute the very blue quality of the shadows. This was done partly with an overall adjustment to color, but some additional work had to be done directly on the shadows.
Photographer and visual opportunist. Daily photos since 2005, plus articles, reviews, news, and ideas.
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