Tag Archives: wilderness

Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Box Elder Thicket, Fall

January 18, 2013 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

A dense thicket of box elder trees along the Escalante River, Utah

Down in the canyons around the Escalante River the terrain varies a great deal. In some areas you might be walking more or less in the stream, perhaps wading up the center of the stream, crossing back and forth across it, rock hopping, and occasionally slogging through very wet sand and mud. In other areas, you might walk through groves of cottonwood or box elder trees of various sizes. Elsewhere you might leave the stream itself and find your way though brush or over and around rocks or slick rock. Sometimes there is abundant vegetation, and in other places you are in a world composed almost entirely of rock.

The river almost continuously twists back and forth and wind around one horseshoe bend after another. These bends seem to me to be important places of transition. On one side you might walk in direct sunlight and be warm. As you pass through the apex of the bend, if you were in the sun you are now likely to pass into shade and the canyon may narrow, perhaps forcing you to cross back and forth across the stream. I found this small clump of box elder trees in such a place. They were quite small – I imagine as a result of growing in an area that could be flooded from time to time – and they grew together densely. It is a challenge to try to make some sort of coherent composition out of such dense and intertwined growth. The interesting side light, reflected from another canyon wall, gave a bit of relief to the thin trunks of the trees, and there are a multitude of relationships to be found among their forms – they are mirror images of one another, or they twist almost in parallel – and in the background is such dense detail that even a very close look at a print shows that there is hardly a place where subjects beyond the trees are visible.

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Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Cottonwood Trees and Cloud-Filled Sky

December 27, 2012 G Dan Mitchell 2 Comments

Massive old cottonwood trees silhouetted against the cloud-filled autumn sky, Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

This photograph was a sort of passing whimsy, in a sense. In this particular canyon that we visited in late October, our attention as mostly focused on avoiding inclusion of the sky in the frame. For the most part, the tall cliff walls were almost the default background for many photographs, so I paid little attention to the sky, for the most part, except to contrive ways to keep its distracting solid blue out of the frame, where it would distract from the colors and shapes and textures of rock and trees and water.

But when I came straight up to this tree just before we entered a narrow section of the canyon, it is was impossible ignore. It is actually a single tree that splits into two twin trunks near its base, with each trunk then sprouting a group of curving, twisting and interlocking branches high above the ground. With this subject, out in the open as it was, photographing it against the background of rock would not have worked, and it was so tall that I was essentially forced to shoot it with the camera pointing up. Fortunately, there were interesting clouds in the sky, and even more fortuitously the lines in the clouds roughly lined up with the left half of the v-shape of the two converging ridges down that canyon. Even better, this shallow “v” of the canyon rims and low peaks beyond echoed and cradled the somewhat similar shape found in the upper branches of the tree.

Photographs: Desert, Photographs: Nature, Photographs: The Southwest, Photographs: Utah

Backlit Trees and Sandstone, Afternoon

December 10, 2012 G Dan Mitchell Leave a comment

Afternoon sun back-lights trees and brush in the sandstone high country of Zion Naitonal Park, Utah

I love this “sea of sandstone” country from the higher elevations of Zion National Park, especially early or late in the day when the low angle sun catches the tips of the needles and leaves of the trees and bushes. The rock formations have a combination of sculpted large features and rough and angular small features that I like as well.

Several times this year I had the opportunity to spend good portions of days along the Mount Carmel Highway through the park. Between the well-known tunnel and the east border of the park, the surroundings are filled with this sort of landscape: small canyons, deeply worn stream beds, knobs of stratified red sandstone, and trees and plants managing to grow anywhere they can get a bit of soil on this rocky terrain. As I travel this road it seems that juxtapositions of these components are constantly forming, sometimes so quickly that I don’t have time to stop. However, because I have been over this road quite a few times now, I’m beginning to understand a bit more where and when to look. The idea here was to line up a couple of almost parallel hill structures, each topped by backlit trees, against the backdrop of shadowed and stratified rock.

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.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: wilderness

Backlit Trees and Sandstone, Afternoon

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