Tag Archives: snags

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

Shoreline Forest With Snags

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Shoreline Forest With Snags
Several skeletal dead trees stand among the trees of a living forest, Yosemite National Park

Shoreline Forest With Snags. Yosemite National Park, California. July 27, 2017. © Copyright 2017 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Several skeletal dead trees stand among the trees of a living forest, Yosemite National Park

This is another of my early morning photographs in the greater Tioga Pass & Tuolumne Meadows area. When photographing here I may head out on foot, especially if I’m camped in the Tuolumne Meadows campground. On the other hand, many interesting subjects are too far to walk and/or sometimes the campground is full and I end up camping outside the park. the latter was the case on this trip — I was camped a couple of miles east of the park. On this morning I got up before dawn and headed over Tioga Pass and down toward Tuolumne Meadows.

I did not have a specific plan in mind, and I was operating in an essentially opportunistic mode, looking for whatever subjects might turn up. I arrived at this lake before the first light struck the trees, and the soft early light tended to illuminate the shadows, opening up details that are very hard to see in typical daytime light. I had few minutes to work before the sun arrived and lit up the trees, so I used a long lens and looked for sections of the forest that provided interesting textures and forms. Here the ranks of trees build up the slope, and a few dead snags are more visible against the relatively uniform backdrop of living trees.

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 and Amazon.
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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Three Snags, Unnamed Sierra Cliff

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Three Snags, Unnamed Sierra Cliff
Three Snags, Unnamed Sierra Cliff

Three Snags, Unnamed Sierra Cliff. Kings Canyon National Park, California. September 16, 2013. © Copyright 2013 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Three dead snags on a small ledge catch the late afternoon light at the base of a huge, shadowed cliff of crumbling granite.

I returned to the area near this cliff face almost daily during our mid-September photography trip to this region of the Kings Canyon National Park back-country. The area was rich with photographic subjects – sub-alpine ponds and larger lakes, late summer golden meadows, granite slabs and boulders, individual trees and forest, the surrounding slopes and cliffs, and the summits of ridges and peaks beyond. We photographed here morning and evening, and in sun and rain and clouds. Although we were in the area of almost a full week, we could easily return for another week and find plenty more to photograph.

This rugged and broken bit of cliff face had intrigued me before I thought to photograph it this way. It rose above the far end of the largest lake in this area, with talus slopes at its base and a higher ridge above. Beyond it other faces and slopes rose into a higher valley that was topped with very high and fractured ridge. At this late time in the summer season, the face was in shade in both the early morning and evening hours, with only some areas struck by light slanting across from one side or the other. While looking at the face I noticed a small group of three bare snags standing in the sun at the lower right and though that I might be able to contrast them with the larger rocky face, and include them as a way to suggest the large scale of the cliffs. The blue tones are, of course, because the rocks are in shadow, though some reflected light adds a glow to some of the rocks facing toward the left. This photograph may be a bit difficult to make sense of at a small web size, but my intention is to print it very large so that the details will be more visible.

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.

Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Owens Valley, Photographs: Sierra Nevada, Photographs: White Mountains

Owens Valley Sky

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Owens Valley Sky
Owens Valley Sky

Owens Valley Sky. Owens Valley, California. August 6, 2005. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Dramatic thunderstorms begin to build above Owens Valley, flanked by the White Mountains and the eastern Sierra Nevada range.

If there is any good news about starting to run out of space on my hard drive, it might be that it encourages me to begin the process of reviewing my tens of thousands of archived raw image files, and that leads me to look through files that I haven’t revisited in a long time – and during this process I find photographs that I had forgotten about. Not only is it worthwhile to rediscover these photographs that ended up buried in the archive, but it is also a chance to recall some of the trips on which the photographs were made.

This photograph is yet another (of many!) that wouldn’t have happened at all if it were not for a whole unpredictable series of events and circumstances. I’ll make the story as short as I can, but it is still a bit involved. Almost every summer I share a long pack trip with a group of my friends. In 2005 we had come up with a 14-day trip along a good portion of the John Muir Trail between roughly the Ediza Lake area and Bishop Pass, which included one of the very few sections of the JMT that I had not hiked. We started at Agnew Meadow, headed up past Shadow Lake, turned south on the JMT, stopped at Reds Meadow, continued on to the Duck and Purple Lakes area… where I started to feel like I might be coming down with some sort of bug. Discretion being the better part of valor and all that, I decided that the prudent thing was to bail out of the trip and exit to Mammoth Lakes since the idea of getting sick on the fourth day of a 14-day hike with a large group was not appealing.

So I hiked out. Ironically, once I crossed the pass to head down to the Mammoth area, I recovered – but it was now too late to rejoin my group since they would be two days ahead of me on the trail at this point. Since I was back at my car now and feeling just fine I figured that I might as well do something else before heading home, so I decided to drive up into the White Mountains and visit the Bristlecone Pine forest. On the way back down from the Whites I just happened to pull out at this spot where the high desert terrain was extra green around a creek, on an afternoon when monsoon conditions were leading to a buildup of afternoon clouds above the Sierra, the Whites, and Owens Valley between the two ranges.

G Dan Mitchell Photography
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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.

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Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Ghost Forest, Near Tawny Point

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Ghost Forest, Near Tawny Point
Ghost Forest, Near Tawny Point. John Muir Trail, Sequoia National Park, California. August 9, 2007. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell.

Black and white photograph of a high altitude “ghost forest” on the John Muir Trail near Tawny Point, Sequoia National Park. These dead trees are located right at timberline in the southern Sierra Nevada at an altitude of close to 12,000′. It appears that an older forest died and that a new one is in its infancy.

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