Tag Archives: season

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

Frost-Rimmed Oak Leaves, Autumn

November 15, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

A very cold autumn morning brings a touch of frost to late-fall oak leaves in Yosemite Valley

Earlier this week I had (just barely) enough time for a very quick one-day up-and-back visit to Yosemite Valley. Such a visit, entailing a four-hour drive each way, and beginning with a 3:30 a.m. alarm going off, is not completely fun in all imaginable ways… but I won’t complain in front of people who might regard a visit to this valley as a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I’m fortunate to live where I’m able to get to such a place and back in a day. The reason for the quick visit was that I had not made my annual “autumn leaves” visit to the Valley. In a typical year I do that right around the first of November (though I often think of it as a Halloween trip!) when the maple, oak, and dogwood leaves can be very colorful. I thought that I had missed the show this year, but over the weekend I heard from friends that there were still leaves in The Valley, so I figured that I would try to get up there for a quick visit.

Having gone there for decades, I no longer go straight for the usual iconic subjects – though I will photograph them when the conditions are extraordinary. Instead, I often end up poking around in odd corners, looking for things that are smaller and less easily seen, but which I associate with The Valley just as much as, say, Half Dome or El Capitan or Yosemite Falls. So, odd as it may seem, when I made my first stop of the day at El Capitan Meadow, with its iconic views of Sentinel Rocks and El Capitan on opposite sides of The Valley… I spent the first 15 minutes with my lens pointed down into a small patch of the Merced River where there were some interesting reflections, and then I wandered off along the river bank in a few inches of snow to photograph close-up views of the wonderful oak leaves rimmed with morning frost. It occurred to me later that some might think it is a bit odd to drive so far to photograph such things!

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

Small Tree and Pink Rock

November 10, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A small tree with yellow autumn leaves grows from a crack in pink sandstone, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

The narrow canyons and slots of South Utah, which I’m just coming to know, are full of surprises at every turn. The “turns” are a literal source of the surprise, since you can’t generally see far up or down the canyons and each turn literally does reveal things that were not visible a moment before. As you progress up (or down) the canyons, the nature of the rock constantly changes as you pass through layers of angled strata of rock – smooth and deep red one moment, pale and broken another, and then light pink or gray. The incline of the canyon changes, as does its width – one moment you are walking on a veritable sidewalk, smooth and wide, and the next you are trying to find your way over rocks and boulders, walking up the middle of a stream, trying to avoid deep and sucking sand, squeezing through a slot, or looking for a higher route around an impassable section. The canyon might be rocky and seemingly devoid of plant life… or you might have to squeeze your way among trees and bushes.

This small canyon presented most of these variables at one point or another. Most of the time we were acutely aware of the stream in the canyon, as our route was in, around, or across the water almost constantly. Here a few small bushes found cracks in the rocky walls with sufficient soil to survive, and the light from far above bounced back and forth between the high canyon walls, picking up the reddish color of the sandstone.

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

Aspen Grove, Old Road

November 7, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 4 Comments

An old dirt road winds into the heart of an aspen grove in full autumn color, Dixie National Forest, Utah

This is another of the “could have been anywhere” photographs, both because little scenes like this can be found all over the American West and because it is a scene that I simply happened to notice while passing by. So, the specific location is most certainly unimportant, though I’ll say that it was along a gravel road running through a section of the national forest in roughly the Zion/Cedar City area, a road that we had turned up more or less randomly and then explored for perhaps a couple of hours before turning back. The goal of that little drive had been to get into or as close as possible to some extensive forests of colorful aspen trees that we had seen from a distance. We succeeded.

There is something evocative on a number of levels about a simple scene like this one – with factors including the literal and subjective aspects of the changing season, the image of the small road disappearing into the grove as it wanders off to an unknown place, and the light of autumn filtered through the golden canopy of aspen leaves. If you don’t pay careful attention when you are there you might miss it, but the golden color suffuses the entire understory when the light is just right. (Photographers and painters may notice this sort of thing more than most people, since we/they are used to dealing with the otherwise blue coloration of the shadow light.) This sort of scene is extremely transitory. While we can permit ourselves to believe that both the green time of summer and the snowy time of winter are relatively permanent, no such illusion is possible during the brief span of literally a few days when the aspen color comes to these groves – they are different every day, and sometimes you can literally see the color going away as the wind blows down the leaves.

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

Boulder Mountain Aspens and Distant Peak

November 6, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 1 Comment

A distant peak in alpenglow above the fall aspen color on Boulder Mountain, Utah.

We had anticipated the huge aspen groves on the flanks of Boulder Mountain as we approached on highway 12 from the west, having seen these trees earlier in the year, last April, when we crossed the mountain in spring before the new leaves appeared. We weren’t sure what we would find since, a) Boulder Mountain is high and b) we had seen high elevations aspens earlier during the trip that had almost completely lost their leaves. As we climbed toward the mountain from the town of Boulder, we began to encounter aspen color, but as we climbed it was apparent that we had missed the most colorful phase of this years transition.

That was OK, though. Even a bit pre- or post-peak, the aspen colors can still be spectacular. We stopped at the first place where we could see large aspen groves leading on up the incline toward the higher portions of the mountain and made some photographs. Then we continued on, rounding the shoulder of the mountain to find some very large and still quite colorful groves ahead of us. Although the light was starting to fade as the end of the day approached and as high clouds moved overhead, it seemed worthwhile to try to photograph these trees with a long lens. I continued shooting through sunset and soon the last direct sun left the trees and the more distant mountains. Here there is still a bit of light on the highest peaks to the east, seen faintly through the haze.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: season

Frost-Rimmed Oak Leaves, Autumn

Small Tree and Pink Rock

Aspen Grove, Old Road

Boulder Mountain Aspens and Distant Peak

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