Tag Archives: wilderness

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.

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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.

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.

G Dan Mitchell Photography

Tag Archives: wilderness

Backlit Trees and Sandstone, Afternoon

Steelhead Lake, Shoreline

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