Tag Archives: storm

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Early Snow, Buried Plants

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Early Snow, Buried Plants
Early Snow, Buried Plants

Early Snow, Buried Plants. North Lake Area, California. October 8, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

An early fall Sierra Nevada snow storm buries meadow plants.

As I have written elsewhere, this year’s aspen color season got off to a rather strange start. Just as the first, high-elevation trees were starting to get their early peak color, an unusually cold series of winter-like storms swept over California and the Sierra during the first week of October. The storms dropped more than a foot of snow in some places, at a time of year when a few inches-deep dustings are more the rule. As the last storm came to an end, I crossed the Sierra via Tioga Pass literally hours after it was reopened, and headed south toward the Bishop area in the evening.

Early the next morning I drove up into the Bishop Creek drainage, encountering the first snow below 8000′. Shortly after passing the village of Aspendell I came to the junction with the gravel road to north lake. The road had not been plowed (and I later heard that it had been closed for several days) but I saw that a few other cars had headed up that way, so I pointed my all-wheel-drive vehicle that direction and drove the short, frozen road to the lower end of the lake. I parked here, loaded up my camera gear, and set off on foot.

It was cold! Before I finished a few hours later I was quite cold, which isn’t surprising since the temperature remained below freezing and I was working in snow. The storm had taken out quite a lot of the colorful aspen leaves. I photographed a few trees, but I also concentrated on other subjects such as fallen aspen leaves lying on the fresh snow. As I walked along the lake I realized that the scene really looked more like winter than like autumn, so I switched gears mentally and made some photographs of the snow that seem more like what I might shoot in the middle of winter. This photograph shows a section of the lakeside meadow that had been covered deeply enough with snow that in places only a few plants were still visible.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer 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.

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

Sunset, Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon

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Sunset, Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon
Sunset, Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon

Sunset, Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon. Yosemite National Park, California. September 19, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

Afternoon storm clouds clear from the sunset sky above Lower McCabe Lake, Shepherds Crest, and Virginia Canyon, Yosemite National Park.

With this photograph I get to tell another of the “serendipitous photograph” stories that seem to keep coming up in my work. In this case, we had been camped near the lake in the lower area of the photograph for several days, getting to know the place and having time to carefully photograph various areas nearby. On a previous evening we had climbed to a second lake a few hundred feet higher than the “main” lake, from which one of our group decided to traverse a nearby slope. He ended up at another alpine lake that looked interesting, and the next morning others went with him to visit it. I didn’t, because I had some other things that I wanted to photograph in morning light and because I had a hunch that the light might turn out to be more interesting in the evening, mainly because the area of the lake was open to the west and, therefore, the evening light.

So in the evening, after our typical very early dinner, I departed on a walk to the upper lake that my friends had visited that morning, wandering around “our” lake and through the surrounding forest to pick up a rocky ramp that ascended toward the lake. However, I apparently missed a turn somewhere. I finished the main part of the climb and apparently should have turned left immediately – but I continued on straight ahead and soon found myself in a little meadowy area with a rather steep bunch of rocks between me and my goal. I finally found a circuitous route up a series of ramps, but now it was getting too close to sunset and my turn-around time, so I had to retrace my steps without getting to the lake.

I returned to the small meadow and made a few photographs there, then headed back toward the route by which I had ascended. Despite not making the lake, one of my main goals had been to get up high to photograph the surrounding terrain at sunset, especially since earlier in the day large thunderclouds had been building to the east and creating the possibility of some very special evening light. As I descended the upper part of the “ramp,” the pre-sunset colors started to light up and I quickly found a spot with a good vantage point to view this in several directions. Among the last photographs I made as the light started to fade was the series including this image. (It is actually a composite of two exposures – one for the very bright and saturated clouds and another for the darker shadows down near that lake.) Beyond the lake is the left end of rocky Shepherds Crest and even further in the distance is Virginia Canyon and then the Sierra crest.

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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Commentary, Locations, Sierra Nevada Fall Color

Sierra Nevada Aspen Hunting and the Weather

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Something to think about for photographers headed to the eastern Sierra to photograph aspen color next week: The seven-day Yosemite to Kings Canyon weather forecast is calling for snow (!) on Wednesday and Thursday, and things don’t look like they’ll totally clear out on Friday. This has some ramifications:

  • Those of us who get to the eastern Sierra by way of one of the trans-Sierra passes may encounter difficulties if the forecast pans out. I would not be at all surprised to see a temporary closure of Tioga Pass Road (highway 120) though Yosemite, and other passes to the north could be affected. This makes for a very long drive for those of us in the SF Bay area!
  • A storm can affect the aspen color display. A cold snap can, or so many of us believe, encourage the colors to change. But wind can also bring down many of the leaves in a hurry. (I once arrived before dawn at North Lake to see – just barely – incredible color conditions in the grove the runs up the hillside on the far side of the lake. Moments later a snow squall blew in, and as the wind began to blow I retreated to my car for a half hour. When it passed, half of the leaves had blown down!
  • On the plus side, an early winter storm can bring some opportunities and advantages as well. Overcast and rainy/snowy weather can intensify the colors and create some very compelling and moody scenes. New snow adds something special to the scene, whether only on the higher peaks above or down among the trees.

It could get interesting, so check those weather forecasts and the road conditions on the mountain highways. Fall in the Sierra is a time of change in many ways. Pacific winter-type weather systems start to move through, and they can range from very mild to virtually full-blown winter storms. While most of them pass quickly, some can last for a few days and close passes. It would be very unusual for such an early October storm to actually mark the beginning of the winter road closures, but mid-October storms have done so in the past.

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

Tree, Granite Slabs, Evening Storm Clouds

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Tree, Granite Slabs, Evening Storm Clouds
Tree, Granite Slabs, Evening Storm Clouds

Tree, Granite Slabs, Evening Storm Clouds. Yosemite National Park, California. September 20, 2011. © Copyright 2011 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A tree and granite slab are lit by brilliant sunset light from a dissipating evening thunderstorm, Yosemite National Park.

This was another of those sometimes-surprising bursts of evening Sierra color that results in effects so gaudy that they almost seem unreal – but this is real. I was camped down in a valley among trees so I wasn’t initially expecting much in the way of spectacular sunset photography. Instead, I planned to take advantage of the early shadows in the valley and get some evening photographs under soft light without any direct sun at all. I first worked some moving water where the nearby river flowed across granite slabs, and then I contemplated photographing some small plants in deeply cracked and patterned granite. As a worked my way across this granite, I remembered a small tree on the other side of the bowl that had looked like an interested photo subject a few days ago, so I walked over to that area where the tree stands in a shallow granite bowl.

Earlier in the afternoon I could see huge thunderheads building up to my east, but they did not move far enough west to affect me with anything more than a bit of gray sky. However, as the clouds built up to higher elevations, their tops began to take on the familiar “anvil” shape and the upper portions of the “anvils” began to spread to the west and out over my position. This is a classic setup for potentially spectacular evening sky color. Near sunset the clouds can pick up intense red/orange coloration from the sun setting in the west. At the same time, the storms begin to dissipate, creating semi-transparent “curtains” of virga (falling rain that doesn’t reach the ground), unusual shapes along the bottoms of the clouds, clouds emerging out of the gray murk as the sunset light picks them up.

As I arrived at my little tree, I quickly lost interest in that subject as the cloud light show began. First the bottom of the thunderhead began to turn brilliantly orange and red. Then the lower reaches of the small storm began to produce very unusual cloud shapes including mammatus clouds. Virga produced a brightly colored by semi-transparent scrim. It quickly became so bright that the red/orange colors began to wash the granite bowl, and I turned my camera from the little tree to the uphill granite surfaces and the clouds above.

In this vertical format image the tip of a small tree extends above the top of a dome-like area above me, and the brilliant light from the clouds washes the dome with color. The colors here have not been “amped up” in post – in fact, I’ve actually toned some of them down a bit!

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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