This photo of Lembert Dome, near Tuolomne Meadows in Yosemite Park, is truly an artifact of digital technology. Without the ability to render the foreground at a lighter exposure than the dome or sky in the digital darkroom, you’d never see the meadow or deer.
This photograph shows Thousand Island Lake and Mt Banner. The islands and the lake are under the snow. I took this photo during a hiking trip in 2005, and recently re-post-processed it for additional clarity and color.
This is a photograph of the Alabama Hills in Owens Valley on the east of the Sierras with Mount Whitney in the background. I took the photograph on a trip to the Eastern Sierra and Death Valley in the autumn of 2005. I reprocessed this version of the photo to be more naturalistic than my original post-processing (shown on Flickr and as a thumbnail in Crossroads of the Cowboy Universe).
A sunset in the mountains may be a cliche, but I can’t resist the beauty. For this one, my tripod and I were positioned on the ridge above the Glen Aulin High Sierra camp. Here’s the view facing the other direction from the ridge.
If you climb the ridge to the west of the High Sierra camp at Glen Aulin, there’s a great view down the Tuolomne River. On the topo maps, this area is called the Grand Canyon of the Tulomne.
At sunset, we saw a wilderness campfire in the trees between Wildcat Point and the Tulomne River. How wonderful and solemn to camp in such a grand place!
By the way, this photo is looking west towards Hetchy-Hetchy and the central California valley. You can see the haze of pollution in the distance at the horizon.
Julian, my nine year old son, and I spent some time at the Glen Aulin High Sierra camp last week. At close to 10,000 feet, the nights were clear and cold.
Getting up to head for the bathroom facilities at about 2AM I saw the vast display of stars twinkling in the sky, as bright as they only are in the mountains where they seem so close one could reach up and touch them.
It was cold (did I say that before?), and I was glad to have carbon-fiber legs on my Gitzo tripod. (Carbon-fiber is light weight and strong, and unlike other materials used in tripods it does not conduct cold.)
I set my Nikon D200 so it could compensate for a long exposure (here’s more info about this setting). Looking up, I could see the stars swirling through the pine trees, but I couldn’t see much of what I was doing at the ground level. Having my headlamp on would obviously ruin the exposure. There was absolutely nothing to be seen through the viewfinder.
In programmatic mode, the camera didn’t register any light, and wouldn’t make a capture. I set the camera for a manual thirty second exposure with the lens wide open.
The LCD screen showed a completely black capture. I couldn’t tell, either when I took the photo or afterwards by daylight, whether I had anything. In fact, I kind of doubted it. But a photographer’s hope springs eternal.
Back home, on the monitor, I could see the smudge on the left representing dark silhouetted pine trees in motion, and the stars in glorious color. The stars don’t look quite like they did to my naked eye, because the sensor of a digital camera picks up UV and IR frequencies of light not visible to us.
I triple-processed the RAW with slightly different exposures for the trees, the background sky, and some of the individual stars.
Driving down the dramatic road from Grant Grove into Kings Canyon, Julian and I descended through a gentle but steady rain. Above the confluence of the middle and southern fork of the Kings River we saw this flowering Yucca. It stood maybe twelve feet tall, decked with drops of water from the rain, over the edge of the immensity of the landcape. I mounted my camera on my tripod, as best I could sheltered it from the rain, and snapped this photo from the edge of the road with a telephoto lens.
Julian and I strapped on our snow shoes and headed up the Muir Trail to Vernal and Nevada Falls. At the bridge below Vernal Falls I snapped this photograph in the swirling snow.
Coming into Yosemite in the winter, when it is probably its most photogenic, I am reminded how much the Sierras are a temple of nature, a sanctuary, a mysterious island, a snow-clad land apart, a refuge, and my most mysterious hidden kingdom.
View this photograph larger.
I called Phyllis, and it was pretty apparent she was at her wits end. I don’t know how she managed the three kids for so long by herself. She is a miracle.
But it was time to come home.
Leaving the Alabama Hills behind, I headed north up Owens Valley. The fall colors were beautiful on the eastern slope of the Sierras:
Sunset was special at Twin Lakes above Bridgeport:
In the morning, temperatures were in the low twenties and ice was everywhere. I had a straight shot home over Sonora Pass and then across the central valley to Berkeley.
You can view a map of my recent travel towards the bottom of my first story in this series.
Above Lone Pine, I camped near the Alabama Hills and directly below Mt. Whitney.
What a wonderful, glorious suprise to wake up just before dawn, clamber up a rock, and see the sun peeping over the east wall of Owens Valley and hitting Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental United States.
A little later, everything had become golden:
You can view a map of my recent travel towards the bottom of my first story in this series.
After reluctantly leaving Hot Creek, I headed down Route 395 into Owens Valley. (View road map of my route here.)
Between the Sierra crest on the west rising to heights above 14,000 feet, and the White Mountains to the east — with summits above 12,000 feet — Owens Valley is the deepest valley in the United States. It’s elevation varies, but is typically around 4,000 feet, so you are looking at a valley that is 8,000 feet deep. Deeper, in other words, than the Grand Canyon.
Here’s a photo looking across the valley towards the Sierra crest:
I think that Owens Valley is one of the surpassingly beautiful places on this earth. It is still fairly undeveloped, although beginning to get a little more crowded.
Early last century, the city of Los Angeles engineered a notorious heist of the water flowing through the valley. In some ways, this may have helped preserved the remote, undeveloped, and beautiful feeling of Owens Valley. (Although this was surely not the motivation of the Angelenos, who merely wanted to wash their cars, water their lawns, and fill their swimming pools.)
The photo at the top of this story shows the inner Owens River gorge, which has become a climbing mecca. The climbing spot is to the left and behind this picture.
Further down Owens Valley, the river becomes a gentle creek, as you can see in this picture I took of an Owens River swimming hole in the early morning:
Julian and I continued our adventures. We left the shores of Mono Lake, and drove towards Bodie in the High Desert.
It was getting late. Crossing into BLM land, we took a side dirt road, and then a side dirt road off that that led to an abandoned mine.
We pulled the car off the road, and made camp. The stars began to come out. We made a small sage brush fire, and toasted marshmallows.
Even though the day had been hot, the high desert night got cold. We were alone in a brilliant universe filled with points of light and shooting stars.
In the morning, the desert was golden, and we could see the Sierras on the horizon.
Julian, my eight year old, and I went on a camping trip for most of this last week. We started in Yosemite Valley, staying in a tent at Camp Curry for several nights.
This year there are many visitors from Europe and Asia in the national parks. It’s amazing how chic these people look, even in an environment as inhospitable to chic as Camp Curry - particularly the French and Italian women.
Camp Curry is run by the park concessionaire that runs all the businesses in Yosemite Park, Delaware North Corporation. This company has nothing to do with either the State of Delaware or the direction North. It is named after a street intersection in Buffalo, New York, and manages to both be incredibly smarmy (running advertorials lauding its environmental practices in front of “campfire” presentations), to serve food that is memorably awful, have zilch in the way of customer service, and be unable to keep its restrooms from becoming filthy - hence my surprise at the aptitude European women have at staying chic.
But Julian loves the place. He gets to run around, explore, and climb all the rocks that are between the tents. He likes sleeping in the canvas tents (actually, a rather filthy cross between a tent and a cabin). Oh, to be eight again and have a brave new world to explore!
We checked in pretty late Sunday night, and spent Monday hiking (up the Yosemite Falls trail), in the swimming pool, and swimming in the Merced River (the Valley temperatures were in the 90s). In the late afternoon, we got in the car and toodled up to Glacier Point (it is about an hour drive).
First, we stopped along the way, and fixed a Mountain House dinner on my camp stove. Thus fortified, we found a spot a few feet from the three thousand foot drop-off to the valley. Julian was cool as a cucumber, but it made me a little nervous to see him sitting so calmly close to the brink.
I set my camera on the tripod, and read “Half Magic” by Edgar Eager to Julian as we waited for the sunset.
The thing that really surprised me about the photo above and the one below is that I took them after dark. These photos are probably only really possible with digital technology.
By the time I took both pictures, everything was pretty completely dark. I had the Nikon D70 set on Aperture preferred metering with the lens stopped way down - f/25. Exposures were long, two seconds in one case, four in the other.
Now here’s where it gets weird. Basically, when you open the camera RAW files of these photos in Photoshop, the default settings in the CS2 conversion dialog makes them look like washed-out daylight shots. I had to fiddle with the conversion settings quite a bit to get them to look like sunset, let alone the almost-darkest-night which was the way it really looked.
We didn’t leave Glacier Point until about 10PM. Julian fell asleep during thr ride back down to the Valley. When we got back to Camp Curry, I got him up and he walked to our tent. In the morning, he didn’t remember waking up - just watching the sunset at Glacier Point.
In the stillness of the early morning at the beginning of July of this year I stood by my campsite high on a ridge admiring the snowy view of the high Sierras. Later that same day, by a snow-covered Thousand Islands Lake, I photographed these wild flowers in a rock outcropping that was emerging from the snow.
You can read the story of this adventure of mine in three parts:
I was reminded of my difficult, but beautiful, trip yesterday when I got a call from a National Park Service ranger asking whether I’d seen missing hiker Hyundo Ahn. Ahn would have been coming south along the John Muir Trail; according to his wilderness permit and mine we would have been in roughly the same place at the same time (the upper Rush Creek basin). The ranger tracked me down on the basis of the dates and locations shown in my wilderness permit.
I didn’t see Hyundo Ahn, a lingusitics student at U.C. Davis, when I was in the Ansel Adams Wilderness back country. Considering the snow conditions, I doubt he made it out over Donahue Pass from Yosemite National Park. I am deeply sorry for his family and friends, and offer this photo of mountain flowers as a testament to the beauty and purety that hides amid the remoteness of the wild - and why it is worth sometimes putting aside the safety net of civilization and exploring these difficult places.
Update (8/19/05): Hyundo Ahn’s body has been found in Tenaya Canyon. The exact cause of death is unknown. He never even made it as far as Tuolomne Meadows, and was not in the area I hiked. Condolences to his friends and family.
© Harold Davis - Rush Creek crossing, early morning, July 3, 2005
This is the third (and final) installment of a story about my recent short — but particularly poorly planned — backpacking trip to the Ansel Adams Wilderness in the high Sierra in this year of extraordinarily heavy snowpack. You can read about how I got into this in first place in A Walk on the Wild Side, and how I dug myself further in: Does the Wilderness Care about Me? Here’s also a topographic trail map of the area if you really want to follow my travails on (and off) the trail.
The walk down the trail from my campsite at Summit Ridge to the Pacific Crest Trail junction and then up to the John Muir Trail junction at the inlet to Thousand Island Lakes was not particularly dangerous. However, my assessment that I had made it through to the end of the snow fields was, of course, premature. As soon as the trail wandered down below timberline into the forest, it vanished under snow that hadn’t melted. Starting up to Thousand Island Lakes, I passed once more in a territory of snow, rock, water, and raging hot sunshine. My 40 SPF all-day sun stuff worked pretty well, but my lips were blistering and the inside of my nose was getting sunburnt.
Here’s a picture of Thousand Islands Lake (as I’ve said, you’ll just have to believe that there are really islands under that snow!):
I sat down, got my bear canister out of my back, and took out some jerky and nuts to have for a late lunch. I also pulled off my socks to dry (the constant snow got in my boots, and I was walking with ice-water wet feet).
Finally, I had a look at the map to see what to do next. I didn’t really want to camp at the lake in the snow, although I could have been comfortable. It was more an emotional thing than anything else. I felt that I wanted to be sure that I could make it out of there.
It seemed from the map that my best bet was to cross Island Pass, which is a relatively low pass at 10, 205 feet, head down into the Rush Creek valley, turn east and follow the trail beside the creek down past Waugh Lake, Billy Lake, Gem Lake, and finally to Agnew Lake — which was where I had come up beside the cog railway. From Agnew Lake it was a short couple of miles down the cliffside to the trailhead at Silver Lake — and, yes, my car!
Although I noted a couple of creek crossings, this looked reasonably unproblematic, although far longer than my route into the wilderness. I was about to get my boots back on and saddle up when a couple of hikers came up along the trail from the south. They were “Batchelor Bob” and “Beer-Keg Ben”. I don’t know where these nicknames came from, but it’s how they introduced themselves. Batchelor and Beer-Keg were in their early twenties and “through-trekkers” — heading on the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. Batchelor carried an ice ax and wore gators. He said, “These gators don’t do any good, my feet still get wet. I’ll die happy if I never see another one of these four feet high snowcups from Hell!”
Snow cups are formed when the snow fields melt in the afternoon. The process of slogging through a snow field in the afternoon is repeatedly climbing up and down over these formations, which as Batchelor rightly said can only been devised by the devil in an inventive mood. Every so often when you are crossing these things in the late afternoon when they are getting melty you go through up to your waist. You can only hope that you are not crashing through to an under-snow pit or raging snow-melt river. It just takes a great deal of energy to get across a field filled with these crusty snow cells.
Beer-Keg Ben was carrying, of all things, a beach umbrella. He said, “I don’t see how anyone crosses 600 miles of desert [along the Pacific Crest Trail near the Mexican border] without carrying one of these things. It’s good on snowfields too.”
We talked about how the snow had slowed them down. Bob and Ben needed to average close to thirty miles a day to reach the Canadian border before October. They said they couldn’t wait for Oregon: “It’s always summer there, we can hike in tank tops and leave the winter gear behind, and rally make tracks.” Well, I don’t think so, but I wish these guys luck.
Bob and Ben headed up in the direction they thought was towards Island Pass. However, they were mistaken about which way to go (they were headed east over a cliff!) and I had to set them straight. We said good bye a second time, and pretty soon I was on the trail behind them, and not too much later the trail vanished under the snow and Bob and Ben’s tracks were gone for good.
To call Island Pass a pass is a little peculiar. Actually, it’s a high, mostly above-timberline plateau complete with a number of small lakes and a bunch of mini-summits. Without a trail, in the snow, navigation was confusing. Here’s a picture of conditions:
Once I figured out that the trail probably headed round the shoulder coming down from Mount Davis, I didn’t have much problem with picking a general route. But steep slopes, afternoon sun cups, ice water traps and rocky ridges made progress treacherous and slow. I could see Donahue Pass, the Yosemite Park border, at over 11,000 feet a good bit higher than Island Pass, under snow in the distance.
I really can’t convey how weird and disorienting it was to navigate around this area. A number of times I went a fairly good distance before climbing to a vantage point and realizing that I had gone off course. You can imagine that a loud exclamation preceded each course correction! But, of course, course correcting was better than heading straight ahead down some snowy cliffs.
After going on the diagonal around a particualrly steep slope, I reached a little rocky summit that I really thought was the further edge of the pass. I was morally certain — which means about 95% — that I had done a good job in coming out where the trail did. What concerned me as I looked out over the valley below was the positively ferocious noise of falling water. Water crashing, roaring, water formed of afternoon ice and snow melt, making a positively cruel noise down below. I hadn’t really thought much before about river crossings, and now I began hoping that there were bridges!
I shambled down the slope with my ice-water feet, and felt positively in awe of myself when I emerged from the snow about fifty feet from the Muir Trail. Holy cow I said to myself, I’m good.
The terrain at the bottom of the valley was a kind of weird stone labyrinth with piers of stone surrounded by twisting water courses that had overrun their banks. When I got to the first crossing, there was a rough plank bridge made of logs that had been cut so they were flat and then chained together (there’s a picture in this blog entry of mine).
After crossing, the trail followed the further bank of the creek, although mostly the trail was either flooded or covered with snow. I picked my way wearily down to the junction with the trail that crossed Rush Creek and would take me home, only to find the creek so high that it could not be safely crossed (the picture is at the top of this story installment).
By now I was so tired that I figured I ought to make camp and deal with it in the morning. I slept soundly, but anxiously, with dreams of falling and pounding water.
In the morning, the water was down several feet, and I thought I had a chance to make it across. (I really couldn’t think of any decent alternatives). I reloaded my pack so that the cameras and other digital gear were as high up as possible. I put my hiking boots on without socks, and slowly started out into the icy, tumultuous creek.
Stepping into the cold, rushing water was frightening, and I couldn’t really see how deep it was. At each step I tried to plant my feet so that I wouldn’t be buffeted down stream, or slip. I often couldn’t tell through the foam where I could step next, or whether there were slippery rocks. I didn’t know whether the water at some point in the crossing would be over my neck.
In fact, the water was no higher than my waist, but you can hardly imagine the force of the snow-melt fed torrent against me even this high. I’m fairly certain that I could only have made it across in the early morning, and that by late afternoon it would have been impassable for a single hiker.
I can report, as you’d expect since I am writing this, that I made it across. More surprisingly, the cameras made it dry. I put my socks back on, and began the long slog down to the trail head. There was one more difficult and wet crossing (the inlet to Waugh Lake), and after that it was a sunny walk beside placid lakes (the trail was still going through mud holes and snow banks, but nothing too difficult compared to what I’d already passed through). Here’s a picture of reflections of snow back in the high country in Waugh Lake:
I had a good, hard look from across Agnew Lake at the cliff I started out by climbing, noticing particualarly the waterfall pouring out from beneath a snow field I had crossed, and called myself an idiot. (See the first part of this story.)
It was late afternoon before I reached my car (I entertained and motivated myself along the way with meditations on food and sex).
In the fews days since I had started on my hike, a volunteer ranger (meaning this was some kind of part time retirement job), his wife, and poodle had moved into a trailer behind a little booth by the trail parking lot. The ranger’s RV had a BBQ in back, surrounded in a neat triangle with astro turf.
Before I drove away, I knocked on the door of the volunteer ranger’s trailer, told him about back country conditions, and suggested he might want to discourage people from following my route (at least without proper snow and ice equipment).
Next stop was the Bad Man from Bodie BBQ Restaurant in Lee Vining for a whole rack of ribs (I did mention that they have a thing about naming food and food establishments after miners in the eastern Sierra - good for tourism, or something).
It was now about 8PM and the sun was a beautiful, setting orange ball. I headed up the magnificant road above Vining Canyon towards Tioga Pass:
As evening turned to night along the Tioga Road I passed Lembert Dome:
And then I saw Half Dome from Olmsted Point:
Finally there was the long drive home through the night, first the dark North Yosemite Highway, then the towns and bustling two-lane roads of California’s central valley, and eventually the freeways of the Bay area megalopolis.
I got home at about 3AM and parked in the garage. I crept upstairs quietly. The house was dark. Phyllis and the boys were sleeping. I showered, and crawled into bed. Phyllis turned over, and touched me. “Oh,” she said, “You’re back.”
I felt like Max, the hero of Where the Wild Things Are. Max is naughty, and sent to bed without supper, where he travels
in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are
Eventually, he grows bored with being the king of all wild things:
and sailed back over a year
and in and out of weeks
and through a day
and into the night of his very own room
where he found his supper waiting for him
and it was still hot.
In the night air of the sleeping house my family was still there and I was happy!
This concludes my story, which began in A Walk on the Wild Side
My story was continued in Does the Wilderness Care about Me?
