Tag Archives: weather

Photographs: Death Valley, Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Southern California

Dust Storm, Death Valley

November 11, 2011 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A building dust storm begins to obscure the sky above Death Valley, California.

In retrospect, there were hints that this tremendous dust storm was coming prior to its actual arrival. Very early in the morning I had been photographing at another location and the light and atmosphere were a bit unusual. The dawn and very early morning light was beautifully warm, but the distant peaks were slightly obscured by a sort of atmospheric haze that is hard to describe but which I now recognize as being associated with incoming dust storms. Soon, large and impressive clouds began to appear high in the deep blue sky, but at about the same time the air closer to the bottom of Death Valley started to look increasingly opaque.

I left my early morning shooting location and began my trip home from Death Valley. After a stop at Furnace Creek – to treat myself to a real breakfast after days of camping – I headed north towards Stovepipe Wells. As I headed north I began to see the obvious clouds of blowing dust accumulating along the Grapevine Mountains, and shortly before the turn to Stovepipe I encountered the boundary between the relatively clear air and the murk of the dust storm that was growing directly ahead and off to my left.

Before entering the cloud – I had not choice since my route went that direction – I pulled over within perhaps a quarter-mile of the edge of the storm. Not wanting to risk dust getting into my camera, I unpacked my gear inside the car and decided to just use the lens that was already fitted to the camera. I stepped outside to find that lines of wind-blown dust were already streaming along the ground and that the atmosphere had taken on the strange and electric feel of these storms. Off to my left, the dust was beginning to kick up among some low, dark hills across a nearby wash, while a gap in the dust clouds momentarily left open a window to the bright sky and high clouds above.

Related: See my posts on Photographing Death Valley

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Early Snow, Buried Plants

October 25, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

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.

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Commentary, Locations, Sierra Nevada Fall Color

Sierra Nevada Aspen Hunting and the Weather

September 30, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

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.

Link to the Yosemite to Kings Canyon 7-Day Forecast
Link to Aspendell Area 7-Day Forecast (Bishop Canyon)

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

Tree, Granite Slabs, Evening Storm Clouds

September 26, 2011 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

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!

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