Tag Archives: sierra

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Eastern Escarpment, Clearing Autumn Storm

October 31, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

An early season autumn leaves a dusting of snow atop Wheeler Ridge, Eastern Sierra Nevada

This long ridge in the Eastern Sierra just north of the town of Bishop has long fascinated me, though for the most part I’ve only looked at it from a distance. (Or from the other side, as there is access via along valley to the west, but that’s a story for another post.) At first I was mostly aware of this steep section of the eastern escarpment of the range when it served as a spectacular backdrop for views of the pastureland and cottonwood trees of Round Valley. But with increased familiarity with the area and opportunities to view if from many directions and distances, I began to note what a tremendously rugged and daunting bit of terrain it is. In many ways, if you ignore the scant vegetation on its slopes, it looks more like the mountains of the desert, even reminding me a bit of places in Death Valley, though with more granite-like rock. Unlike many other Eastern Sierra locations, there is little (no?) evidence of glaciation, but plentiful evidence of erosion from water, including the classic alluvial fan spreading from the steep valley between the low hills in the foreground.

Despite the lack of glacial evidence, the scene presents many other classic components of the eastern face of the range in Autumn. Although it is small against the tremendous landscape, there is an aspen grove and a bit of summer-brown grass near the lower left. The main rocks seem to be the granite that we expect to see in the Sierra. The rocks are lit by filtered sunlight from the southeast. And the cloud drifting in front of the rugged face is the remnant of a passing storm that has dusted the highest peaks with a bit of early season snow, promising that winter cannot be far off.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Yellow Leaves, White Trunks

October 30, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A few yellow leaves remain in a grove of small, tightly packed Eastern Sierra aspens

With this year’s unusual Eastern Sierra fall color transition, I had plenty of opportunities to photograph aspen groves with few or no leaves. Most likely as a result of the four-year California drought, some aspen trees seemed to be under a lot of stress. Some of these trees were bare very early in the season, others changed colors a week or more early, and other simply lost their leaves without a real color transition. (Fortunately, some trees were not as stressed, and these prolonged the color season to and beyond the usual time in mid to late October.)

I enjoy photographing dense groves of small trees, with their complex and packed patterns of trunks and leaves. I spotted this grove a day earlier while in the area, so late in the day when the light started to fade and I found myself nearby, I headed back this way to photograph the grove in fading light. I like photographing aspens in this light, as it fills in the shadows, avoids the stark shadows of midday light, and tends to saturate the colors naturally. I searched this grove for the right spot and finally found it here — a place with almost uniformly dense small trees and a band of strongly colored leaves running horizontally.

All media © Copyright G Dan Mitchell and others as indicated. Any use requires advance permission from G Dan Mitchell.

Photographs: Fall, Photographs: Fall Color, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Leafless Aspen Grove

October 29, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Sierra Nevada aspen grove with bare trunks

I’ve written before that this has been a very strange fall color season in the Eastern Sierra, and this photograph might be an example. Although the photograph was made very near the beginning of October, typically the time that the peak colors are arriving, this grove was one of many that were already completely devoid of autumn leaves. After spending some time in a very colorful area much further south along the eastern slopes of the Sierra, I decided to head back to the San Francisco Bay Area over a couple of passes that cross the range much further north. Near the top of one of these passes there is a vast open area that holds many large aspen groves, and I had hopes of photographing some color here late in the day.

I arrived to find a beautiful scene — high, open sagebrush country with clouds moving quickly across the landscape and creating changeable light. But the aspens were pretty much spent. I pulled off the main road at a place I know well, and took a short detour down a little gravel road toward the edge of groves where there are some very large trees. Here I found the trees, alright, but the leaves were gone. Fortunately, I like aspen groves in almost any condition — with bare branches, with new spring growth, with colorful autumn leaves, in snow — so I went to work photographing the dense patterns of closely spaced aspen trunks in the soft late-day light, muted even further by clouds.

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

Lake, Trees, Storm

October 26, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Evening at a subalpine lake on a day of late-season storms

This weeklong photography trip into the Yosemite backcountry this September brought some very strange atmospheric conditions. To begin with, the four-year California drought has deeply affected the Sierra, and by the time we got into the mountains there were wildfires up and down the range. One significant fire was burning no far away inside the park, another large fire burned just outside the park to the north, and a small lightning-caused “management fire” was burning very close to our camp. At least once per day we were inundated with thick wildfire smoke, morning or evening. (We counted ourselves lucky to get a good half day of photography conditions each day.)

Closer to the end of the trip we encountered another weather anomaly. Thunderstorms are not unusual this time of year, and it is even possible to get an early Gulf of Alaska Pacific storm. But instead we got the remnants of the hurricane off of Mexico. When all was said and done we had virtually two days of rain — not the terrible rain that keeps you in at the tent, but the general light rain that eventually gets everything wet, but which also produces some very wonderful effects of atmosphere and light. This evening exemplified such conditions. Beyond the forest ringing out lake the sky included dark clouds and lighter areas where a bit more light made it through, and all of this was mirrored in the calm surface of the lake.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: sierra

Eastern Escarpment, Clearing Autumn Storm

Yellow Leaves, White Trunks

Leafless Aspen Grove

Lake, Trees, Storm

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