Tag Archives: sequoia

Great Western Divide

Great Western Divide
Great Western Divide

Great Western Divide. Sequoia National Park. August 2, 2010. © Copyright 2010 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

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.


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.
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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.

Redwood Forest

Redwood Forest
Redwood Forest

Redwood Forest. Muir Woods National Monument, California. July 11, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Redwood trees growing in a gully at Muir Woods National Monument

I had a couple of primary goals on this visit to Muir Woods National Monument: I thought it might be a good location to shoot on this overcast summer day since the high fog softens the light that can otherwise be quite challenging inside the redwood forest. I also wanted to play with a new ultra wide-angle zoom lens, and I figured that this would be a better place for that activity than spending time in an urban setting… even though the latter might allow for more objective lens testing.

I typically arrive at Muir Woods very early in the morning, partly for the quality of the light in the forest at that time of day and partly for the very practical reason that the hordes of tourists from San Francisco are still mostly having coffee back at their hotels! However, I did not get there quite as early this time, and as I entered the park I could tell that it would not be too long before those hordes finished their coffee and began arriving. So I took a side trail up out of the valley of Redwood Creek (the location of the popular nature hike loops) and climbed up towards higher ridges. I was not alone on this trail but there the number of other hikers was reasonable, and for reasons ranging from aesthetic to objective (e.g. – testing that lens) this turned out to be a good choice. As the trail climbed, the views opened both above and below my camera position, and it was possible to shoot straight toward the trees and show a bit more of their height. Here a group of younger redwoods grows closely together in a small valley.

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.
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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.

Young Redwood Forest

Young Redwood Forest
Young Redwood Forest

Young Redwood Forest. Butano Redwoods State Reserve, California. June 1, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A forest of young second-growth coast redwood trees, Butano Redwood State Park

Today’s post will swing in essentially the completely opposite direction from yesterday’s, which featured a photograph made in one of the very driest and most desolate areas of a very dry and desolate place, Death Valley National Park. So today I share a photograph from a lush and green location, one of California’s redwood state parks—this one the Butano Redwoods State Park, near the California coast between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay.

The first day of June was a foggy one in the Bay Area and along the Central California coast, so it seemed like I might be able to find the fog-sun boundary a bit later in the morning that usual. With that in mind I drove over the hills to the coast and then headed north on the Pacific Coast Highway from Santa Cruz, eventually turning onto a road that heads back up into the coastal Santa Cruz Mountains range. A few miles back from the ocean, I found the edge of the fog at this state park, where I walked up the valley of a creek running through the second-growth redwood forests, stopping frequently to make photographs of the lush green terrain until the fog cleared and the light became too intense.

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 | FacebookGoogle+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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.

Redwood Forest, Spring

Redwood Forest, Spring
Redwood Forest, Spring

Redwood Forest, Spring. Butano Redwoods State Park, California. June 1, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Dense spring growth and fog-filtered light in the forest at Butano Redwood State Park

I’ll stick with the redwoods theme for a bit longer and share another photograph from my recent first-time photography visit to the Butano Redwoods State Park along the California coast between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay. I had not visited this park before, much less photographed it, though I had photographed along the access road that leads to it from the Pacific Coast Highway. It is a pleasure to actually “discover” a new park so close to home!

I chose to visit on this day at least partly because of the promising light. It remained foggy and cloudy along the coast pretty much all day, so I figured that if I went inland a few miles toward the redwoods I might catch the thinning fog and the soft light that it can produce. I found a trailhead, loaded up the camera pack and tripod, and headed out. There was so much to see in this lush forest that I made very slow progress, stopping every couple of minutes to consider and sometimes make another photograph. From this spot along the trail I found a view past closer trees and on into more distant growth, and I stopped to make a few photographs. In this one I chose to work with a vertical composition to emphasize the slender forms of the second-growth redwoods and other trees reaching toward the light.

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 | FacebookGoogle+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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.