Tag Archives: wilderness

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Beaver Pond, McGee Creek

October 17, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A beaver pond floods a low area of McGee Creek below the peaks at the edge of Pioneer Basin.

Unlike some so-called beaver ponds in the Sierra, this one really does appear to be the home of beavers. If you look closely near the far bank of the pond, just left of center, you can see the distinctive peaked beaver den.

This spot was a bit of a landmark on the trail up McGee Canyon on my mid-September backpack trip to Steelhead Lake. Before this the trail mostly crossed relatively dry and open terrain, but starting at this point there was more forest cover, and the valley gradually began to become more rocky and narrower. There is just a bit of early fall color in this photograph. The plants around the pond have obviously gone brown, and some of the aspens and other brush ascending the slopes of the canyon are just barely beginning to change – what I sometimes call the “lime green” stage where it starts to become clear that the real color change is not far away. The distant tall ridge marks the boundary between the McGee Creek drainage and Pioneer Basin. I’m not positive, but I think that the two high points on the ridge might be Mounts Stanford and Crocker, part of a group of four peaks ringing Pioneer Basin that are named after the four “railroad barons, the other two being Huntington and Hopkins.

Unlike most of my mountain photographs, this was essentially a handheld “snap” – though made with a good camera and lens. When I’m hiking I carry my camera and two lenses in a chest strap mounted front carrier so that I can make some photographs while on the move without having to remove my pack. This sort of shot, made at a time of less than optimum light, is an example of the sort of thing that I’ll occasionally shoot that way.

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

Steelhead Lake, Shoreline

October 8, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

The curving shoreline of Steelhead Lake, photographed in early evening light.

This is a fairly simple shot, and I think it represents a sort of scene that many Sierra Nevada back-country travelers know well. Steelhead Lake sits high on a bench up in the McGee Creek drainage, with a very tall ridge running to the east (and blocking early morning light) and a deep canyon to the west and northwest, with views toward the Sierra crest beyond. Unusual for an east-side location, there is much better light in the evening than in the morning. (More typically, east-side high country areas are open to the east and the morning light, and the evening light is blocked by the Sierra crest.) Most of the shoreline of the lake is forested, with the exception of a section at the upper end that is covered by the base of a talus field spilling down from the higher ridges.

We camped on what almost amounted to a peninsula, at least when viewed from the direction from which the trail arrives at the lake. Our spot on the peninsula was high enough to command a view of most of the moderate sized lake, and especially back across this little cover below our position. Late in the day as the setting sun approached the crest of the Sierra out of the frame to the left, low angle light slanted across the valley below and onto the low ridge along the edge of the lake, illuminating the atmospheric haze and back-lighting the trees along the shoreline.

Photographs: Nature, Photographs: Sierra Nevada

Steelhead Lake, Morning

October 6, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Morning light on shoreline trees at Shoreline Lake.

This photograph comes from my late-season three-day backpack trip up into McGee Canyon in the eastern Sierra. This has been a very unusual summer in various ways, so it was almost certainly also my only pack trip this season. (This is very unusual for me – I typically spend several weeks to as much as a month on the trail each summer.) I have visited the McGee Creek trailhead on a number of occasions, most often while searching for aspen color, but I had never hiked more than perhaps a quarter mile up the trail into the canyon. The three of us were rather lazy about planning. At various times leading up to the trip we had thought about heading up to the McGee Lake area, possibly crossing McGee Pass on the Sierra crest and various other ideas – but we hadn’t really settled on anything specific by the time we arrived at the trailhead.

More or less while loading up the packs, we decide that Steelhead Lake would be out likely objective. None of us had been there before, and I was pretty much completely unaware of the place or more than the general outline of the day’s hike. I had briefly looked at maps, but not in any detail. I understood that we would follow the main trail straight up the canyon and then follow its curve to the left as we climbed. I also knew that somewhere up there I would find a trail junction to Steelhead Lake and that it didn’t look like the like was very far beyond this junction. (Sometimes I like to intentionally avoid knowing too much about a place in advance, since this allows me to discover it on its own terms when I get there.) The first portion of the hike was much as I imagined, except that I was surprised to find that there were extensive aspen groves and that they were already changing colors. There was one bit of surprise when the junction to Steelhead Lake turned out to be further up the trail than expected. However, the biggest surprise – and not quite the happiest one – was that what looked like a short journey up this side trail to the lake turned out to be a very, very steep climb! In any case, the lake itself turned out to be a pretty little isolated place, being at more or less the end of a spur trail. It sits in a bowl that with steep slopes on two sides and, somewhat surprisingly for an “east side” location, while it gets decent evening light over the crest, it does not get very early morning light at all. I made this photograph shortly after that morning light had finally arrived and backlit some of the lakeside trees near out campsite.

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

Parker Lake and Parker Canyon, Fall

October 4, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Aspens in fall color in the lower reaches of Parker Canyon above Parker Lake, Sierra Nevada

As the fall aspen color season comes along, I’ll share photographs of this annual phenomenon, both from the current year and from past seasons. This photograph comes from last year, the autumn of 2011. That was a fall color season to remember in the eastern Sierra Nevada range, and for several reasons. First it was unusual in that several strong winter-type storm fronts swept over the Sierra during the first week or so of October. While an occasional front that drops a light coating of high elevation snow is not unusual this time of year, a series of storms that dropped up to a foot of snow in many places was a surprise. (Many of us were perhaps tricked into thinking that this was an indication of a third consecutive heavy precipitation year – but we were certainly wrong about that!) So a scene that might typically hold little or no snow at this mid-October date does have snow, and a fairly low elevations as well. Second, the development of aspen color took a few interesting twists and turns that year. There was some good color early on up high, but then the snow came and both made it less accessible and took down some of the early leaves. So this early color was interrupted, only to return in grand form a week or so later – and there was a lot of wonderful color by the middle of the month when I made this photograph.

Parker Canyon is an area that I identify with a bit. I often hike out to Parker Pass on the Sierra crest from inside Yosemite – it is a nice day hike that gets into some lovely alpine country and even is conducive to one of my favorite pastimes in the high country, cross-country hiking. So I’ve been at the pass a number of times… but have never gone much beyond it. I understand that the trail over Parker Pass heads into some very high country once it leaves the park boundaries. In addition, I’ve often looked to this area for some later color when I head to the eastern Sierra to photograph the aspens, where the area known as “Parker Bench” can have some great aspen stands. On this day I hiked from the end of the road up to Parker Lake, joining lots and lots of other folks out to see the fall color show. I did the hike more or less in the middle of the day, following early morning shooting and passing the time before the later light, and I did not necessarily expect to find a lot of interesting light to photograph. However, there were clouds! And these clouds muted the harsh midday light and added some interesting shadows to the landscape. In addition, the dark rock of Parker Canyon created an appealing contrast with the bright and colorful aspens near the upper shore of Parker Lake.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: wilderness

Steelhead Lake, Shoreline

Steelhead Lake, Morning

Parker Lake and Parker Canyon, Fall

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