Tag Archives: slope

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Sunset Light and Talus Slope

December 10, 2014 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Sunset light on a tree-covered peninsula as a steep talus slope falls into evening shadows

This photograph from the first evening of a week-long 2010 southern Sierra backpacking trip reminds me of many things, but at the moment I’m recalling a particular feeling that often comes on the first night on the trail, and which is one of these moments that marks the transition away from the other world to the magical world of the backcountry. Arriving at the start of a long backcountry trip requires a fair amount of planning that begins well before the trip. Often months before (those sometimes on the previous weekend!) a plan is hatched and a group of people assembled. Soon dates are set and an itinerary comes together. As the date approaches, we collect gear together and begin to pack and make the plans for our absence. The process accelerates as the day approaches and soon we are on our way to the mountains, often arriving at a trailhead came the night before, where the familiar sensations and rhythms begin to return.

The next morning we are up early, packing away the things we brought for that first campground night and paring down our possessions to only those things we’ll carry on the trail. We tear down camp, check and double-check gear, fill up water bottles, lock cars, head to the trailhead for the inevitable photo by the sign… and we are off. The first point of breaking away (once again!) is at this moment when we start up the trail, but in some ways this is often the beginning of a mental transition that will last all day as we again become accustomed to life on the trail. We climb, we stop to filter water, we eat our first of many trail lunches, the climb becomes harder as we watch for the pass up above. Eventually we reach that pass, where we stop and sit for a while, looking into the world where we’ll spend the next few days or week(s), then we head down the other side of the pass, an act that always seals the feeling of commitment to the trip. We arrive and set up our first trail camp, once again putting specialized equipment to use, remembering just how we set up that tent and operate that stove. Then, once all these tasks are complete, we find what we came for — there is nothing left to do. So we do nothing. We walk slowly around the lake, make some photographs, sit on a rock, and quietly watch the last light on a tree-filled peninsula beneath shadowed talus slopes.

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.

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

Rocky Slope, Autumn Foliage

October 28, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Autumn foliage on a steep, rocky eastern Sierra Nevada slope

This is a bit of a complicated photograph, and I’ll try to make some sense out of it below. The back story is that I was in the eastern Sierra doing some fall color photography, and early on this Saturday morning I had gone to a fairly popular location for photography. It is a place that I’ve photographed many times, going all the way back to a few years ago just before the huge popularity of digital cameras began to bring sometimes-overwhelming numbers of photographers to the area. I was quite sure that there would be large groups there on this morning, including photography workshop participants lined up along the shoreline of the nearby lake, but I also knew that there would be plenty of other things for me to photograph without joining the crowd.

I began by making some photographs of small things — little vignettes of a few aspen leaves, some rocks and boulders, light shining through branches holding colorful leaves. As I did this I saw that the far side of the canyon was going to remain in shadow after the sun began to wash things out elsewhere, so I decided to use a long lens and photograph trees and rocks in that location from a distance. Most of the photographs feature more obvious subjects such as an individual grove of colorful trees, but in this one I decided to just go with the complexity of the scene, which includes broken rocks, brush, and a few small aspen trees.

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

Forest, Talus, Winter Fog

March 12, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Winter fog floats across forest and talus fields, Yosemite Valley

I’ll take a cold and foggy winter morning in Yosemite over a blue sky summer day anytime! On this morning I was up reasonably early, though unsure of what I might be able to photograph. The light down in the Valley was tending toward flat and gray, so I thought that it might make sense to go to Tunnel View and hope for some early morning sun that might illuminate the various layers of clouds and mist from behind. That never happened, so I turned my attention instead to the fog down in the Valley.

It is common at this time of year for fog to form in the Valley after precipitation, and it had rained all of the previous day and was threatening to on this morning, too. When the fog starts to form, almost anything can happen. There might only be thin, wispy bits of fog below, or large clouds of fog may form and drift back and forth and up and down the Valley, lowering so that tree tops are visible or rising to cover the upper slopes of peaks and cliffs. On this morning there seemed to be thicker fog far up the Valley, but in the middle section and just below us the fog was thin enough that as it drifted across the forest some trees almost always remained visible. Photographing this was a matter of using a very long lens and then watching closely as the conditions evolved. For a while it might seem like nothing photographically special would happen, and then some combination of fingers of fog moving through trees, a bit of clearing somewhere, a sudden but silent movement of the clouds would happen, and suddenly a composition would appear out of nowhere and often just a suddenly disappear. Here the fog was drifting up into the talus slopes near the base of El Capitan.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sequoia-Kings Canyon, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Snag and Talus Field

February 4, 2014 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

An old snag stands atop a rocky outcropping and in front of a huge talus field, Kings Canyon National Park

During our mid-September 9-day expedition into the Sierra Nevada high country of Kings Canyon National Park we spent the better part of a week camped in this 11,000′ basin full of lakes and trees and rocks. We camped near the outlet stream of a lake located in a narrow section of the valley, with many more lakes beyond our location and a string of them ascending the valley to our south. Each day, from early morning until after dark, was largely spent exploring this landscape and making photographs.

The valley of lakes to our south, of which our lake was the lowest, was plainly visible to us from our camp site, which was situated on a rise above this lowest lake. From here we could look up the canyon across “our lake” and see a string of several other lakes along this creek. A few were easy to see while others further up the valley revealed themselves primarily by surrounding rock and by breaks in the vegetation. Every day, no matter what else we were doing and where else we photographed, we did at least some work around these closest lakes, and I developed a sort of “daily rounds” taking me up one side of the valley to the upper lake and then back down the other, with occasional detours across the middle of the valley. Is I recall, I was making one of those detours when I photographed this tree, located on top of a small rocky knoll in the middle of the upper valley and backed by the tremendous talus field descending from the surrounding ridges high above.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: slope

Sunset Light and Talus Slope

Rocky Slope, Autumn Foliage

Snag and Talus Field

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