This is all that remained in 2008 of the Jeffrey Pine on Sentinel Dome that was the subject of the famous Ansel Adams photograph,”Jeffrey Pine, Sentinel Dome.” Somewhere I even have my early attempts at trying to do the “Ansel Adams thing” with my black and white film camera when I was much younger, featuring one or more photographs of this very tree, while it was still alive. Trust me, if you are a Sierra Nevada landscape photographer of a certain age, you knew this tree and probably visited it.

I photographed this close-up “portrait” many years after the tree died, while on a quick hike over to the summit of Sentinel Dome along the Glacier Point Road in 2008. Things change slowly in the Sierra, but they do inevitably change. This is now, objectively speaking, another dead snag atop a Yosemite granite dome — however, this snag has achieved a sort of iconic status. Yet, perhaps there will eventually be another, maybe even the younger tree seen in the background beyond the dead stump.

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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” (Heyday Books) is available directly from him. Blog | Bluesky | Mastodon | Substack Notes | Flickr | Email

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