Tag Archives: usa

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

Ridgetop Trees, Cloudy Sky

October 28, 2015 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A momentary break in a September storm lights ridgetop trees against a cloudy sky

In a way, I sneaked up on this stand of trees over a period of several days. A small group of us camped at a backcountry Sierra lake for about a week back in September. The experience of photographing in one limited area for this long is quite different from photographing while actively backpacking or while moving around by vehicle. Each morning one wakes up in the same place, and each morning one heads out into the same landscape, looking for new views of it or for subjects and locations that were not immediately apparent. We also have the opportunity to return to subjects more than once as the conditions change — different times of day, different atmospheric conditions, and so forth.

These trees stand atop a glacially carved ridge above “out” lake and between it and another similar lake below. The rocky terrain limits the growth of trees and they tend to stand apart from one another, often revealing more clearly the shapes of individual trees. I first saw this area and it trees very early on during our visit, and I climbed the low ridge a number of times. Near the end of our stay a storm swept in and we had on and off rain for a couple of day. I went out on this somewhat soggy day, alternately walking around the landscape and using that very landscape to hide from the intermittent showers that passed through. I hiked up the hill in the rain, using a thicker bit of forest for cover, and I emerged into the open as the clouds thinned a bit and the rain momentarily diminished, and the landscape lightened as weak sunlight shone. This clump of trees stands resolutely near the very top of the ridge.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: usa

Eastern Escarpment, Clearing Autumn Storm

Yellow Leaves, White Trunks

Leafless Aspen Grove

Ridgetop Trees, Cloudy Sky

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