Photoblog 2.0

Westgard Pass, photo by Harold Davis.

Westgard Pass lies on lonely Route 168 between Big Pine and the great open desert country of basins, ranges, and valleys. (View a map of the area towards the bottom of my first story in this series.)

Westgard Pass is closed to commercial trucking (the road is too narrow, steep, and twisting). Beyond Westgard Pass, to the east is a small, isolated college in Deep Springs, a ranch or two in Oasis, and nothing much else in terms of towns or people until you hit Goldfield or Beatty in Nevada, hundreds of miles away.

Oh yes, at the otherwise barren intersection of Nevada Highway 266 and U.S. 95 there are a series of legal whorehouses in the middle of nowhere. Invariably created from a number of pre-fabs stitched together, these hermetic and airconditioned institutions have big signs saying “Brothel,” “Open for Business,” and “Free Parking All Night.” If you are curious about legal prositution in Nevada, here’s the Wikipedia article on the topic, and here’s a site put up by the marketing arm of the legal Nevada prostitution business organization.

As far as I am concerned, human society in Nevada is pretty gross. Stinking of stale tobacco smoke in every room, Nevadans have even managed to make consensual sin with another person look lonely and solitary.

This picture shows Westgard Pass, which I think of as the gateway to the desert, from above.

Owens River Gorge, photo by Harold Davis.

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:

Hot Creek, photo by Harold Davis.

Hot Creek is a cold mountain stream flowing out of the eastern Sierra. Intense volcanic activity makes eddies of hot, bathable water in the middle of the stream.

For me, Hot Creek is a canonical stop in any trip to the eastern Sierra, as it was recently after I headed over Tioga Pass and before I went down into Owens Valley (view a map of my trip).

Despite fairly heavy usage — on a summer weekend there will likely be hundreds of people in the various pools in the creek, the Green Tortoise makes it a regular stop, and German tourists on Harley Davidson motorcycles visit on a schedule — the place is pretty clean and unspoiled.

Hot Creek lies on U.S. Forest Service land, which calls the place a “geologic feature” and plays down the bathing aspect. Signs at the parking lot at the top of the trail down to the creek report various accidents at the creek (dogs have gone into scalding hot pools, and their owners have been hurt going in after them).

There’s nothing like lolling around in 104 degree water for hours to facilitate pleasant conversations with strangers. One of my companions this time was a risk management professional. His job was to assess risk from things like storms, earthquakes, and volcanic activity for clients like electric utilities.

We chuckled together about a risk management consultant placidly bathing in one of the most active volcanic sites in the country. Then he said something I’ve been thinking about since then:

I know it could blow here anytime, but it’s worth it. As a professional matter, the risks you know about can be judged and calibrated. The risks someone doesn’t know about are incalculable to that person — because they don’t know about them. When something you haven’t thought of that is bad happens, you feel blindsided. But this is not a realistic attitude, because everything has a probability.

Reflections, photo by Harold Davis.

Leaving the waterfalls of Yosemite behind, I continued with my trip.

The sun was just reaching the trees, as in this picture, when I drove through the Valley on my way to the junction with Route 120 towards Tioga Pass. (You can see a map here.)

At the opening to the Valley, where Route 120 peels up and away from Route 140 (which heads down to Merced), I saw a hitchhiker with a backpack headed my way. It’s perhaps appropriate to mention at this point that the car I drive, fondly called “URL” (his license plate — we pronounce it “earl”), was bought with tech bubble proceeds to impress investors, and not as a photographer’s car. Here’s a picture of URL-the-car (taken later on this same trip in Rhyolite-the-ghost-town):

To digress, “URL” is a great car for roadtrips, but not really the thing for navigating tracks in the mountains and deserts (let alone the trackless mountains and desert) . The ideal photographer’s car should be four-wheel drive, have high clearance, not be conspicuous, and have room to sleep in the back.

The hitchhiker was about my age (definitely old enough to know better) as scruffy as only someone can be who has been spending unwashed time on the trail. His name was Mark. Mark smelled bad enough that I inwardly winced when he said he was going up to Lake Tenaya — when I smelled the stink I’d been hoping the ride would be of shorter duration. I powered down my window even though it was morning chill outside.

Things got better when we started talking. Mark was from Idaho. He’d left his car up at the Sunrise lot near Lake Tenaya, and hiked down to the Valley. After several days, he was on his way back to his car.

Mark explained to me that he wasn’t carrying any food to avoid having to deal with bear canisters (and the bears in the Valley). I stopped by Yosemite Creek at a picnic ground to get him some jerky and trail mix. Mark said he could eat as we drove. I explained to him that nobody eats in URL-the-car, and asked him to finish eating before we started driving again. I think Mark thought this was pretty funny — he started asking about my kids, the state of my wife’s car, and how I felt about desert dust.

I asked Mark what he did for a living, and he said he was an investor. Pretty soon we were deep in arcane discussions of Brazilian index funds, energy options, and technology stocks.

Mark said he thought people in their twenties were different from him and me. I asked how, specifically. He said they didn’t have a clue about vaccuum cleaners. (Meaning, I guess, that cleaning wasn’t high on the agenda for young people, and also that they found it hard to follow the linear instruction materials that typically come with appliances like vaccuum cleaners.)

I asked Mark why he thought he knew about twenty-somethings. He said he winters in the south of India, spending $1.23 a day, and spends a lot of time with young people on the beach in India and at Burning Man.

I think Mark was missing what the social scientists call an intervening variable: the people who end up on the beach in Southern India, or at Burning Man, of whatever age, are less likely to be interested in vaccuum cleaners than people walking the corporate path. When I was much younger, I had a girlfriend I thought very exotic and intriguing because she had spent a great deal of time hanging out in India. She was inordinately fond of her bong from Goa. And she certainly didn’t have a clue about vaccuum cleaners, or cleanliness. QED.

But Mark was truly right about one thing that is usually very hard for wealthy people to grasp. He said, “I think having too much money can really isolate you from important life experiences.”

For example, most millionaires don’t hitchhike. If Mark were one of them, he and I wouldn’t have met, and I would have missed getting to know a fascinating soul.

It’s hard for me to remember all of our wide-ranging conversation, but I do think that the most important for Mark was that people should avoid being trapped by their habits, and avoid getting stuck in a narrow rut. In his view, having money is a potential trap — as is simply following habits reflexively. He said, “If you are getting stuck doing the same thing without thinking, move to another city.”

I dropped Mark off at his car (a battered camper with Idaho plates) and stopped beside Lake Tenaya to photograph the reflections shown at the top of this story, in a previous blog story, and here:

Yosemite Autumn, photo by Harold Davis.

I’m just back from a week trip to the mountains and the desert.

Phyllis is a saint and took care of the three kids more-or-less solo. I think Julian wanted to come with me so much that he really was acting out. Handling the three of them at once is no piece of cake for one person.

I visited Yosemite, the eastern Sierra, and the desert.

On this trip I took over 1,000 images, and as time goes by I’ll be processing and blogging the best of them. I’m very excited by these photos, but they are stark.

The purpose of the entry is to explain in an overview fashion where I went.

If you look at the map, you can see I first drove to Yosemite, where I spent several days hiking. (You can click on the map or here to see it in a larger size.)

After Yosemite, I went over Tioga Pass and into Owens Valley.

I drove south down Owens Valley, stopping to take pictures, and then turned east towards Westgard Pass, the ancient Bristlecone Pines, and the desert.

From Beatty, Nevada I explored the ghost town of Rhyolite, and then entered Death Valley National Park.

I returned to Owens Valley near Lone Pine, watched the sunrise shed morning alpenglow on Mount Whitney, and spent several sessions photographing the Alabama Hills.

Turning north, I headed for Bridgeport, photographed Twin Lakes, and had a straight shot home over Sonora Pass.

This is the macro picture. Stay tuned for more photos, and stories of my travels in more detail.

Cecil Bruner Rose, photo by Harold Davis.

This is a Cecil Bruner rose from my planting of about five or six years ago.

What turns out is that Cecil Bruners do wonderfully well around here, love the local climate, and are mostly desease resistant.

I didn’t know this when we planted it, but I do now. This climber worked its way up our fence and arched over the sidewalk to the street signs, forming a fragrant and colorful tunnel.

What I also didn’t know was that this flowering tunnel bothered some people (although others loved it). There were anonymous complaints to the city (c’mon people, why don’t you just talk to us, we are neighbors)!

Once I realized that it upset people, of course it had to come down. A big job. The Cecil Bruner will flower in our garden, but it won’t overhang the path, and it won’t bother people. (And it will grow back!)

I like my garden somewhat wild looking, and I think that offends a suburban mentality - even here in Berkeley. If we lived in the country far away from neighbors, of course we could plant anyway we liked, but here one has to respect the feelings of others.

All this said, in some ways I like the garden better without the massive Cecil Bruner dominating one side. It is lighter and airier.

This is a photo of a small bud from the cuttings. Taken with my 105mm Nikkor macro and a 30mm Kenko extension tube, 4 seconds exposure time, and stopped down to f/51.

Pale Rose, photo by Harold Davis.

I’ve been rationalizing the organization of the my photos. This is nothing radical.

The problem is that the software that comes with my various cameras generates opaque folder names. For example, the Nikon stuff calls each folder imgxxxx (where xxxx is a four-digit number).

I stopped using the manufacturer’s software a while back (simply cutting and pasting instead) - but a alot of these folders persist. Depending on the vendor, they don’t have a date (Nikon) or don’t have a content description (Canon).

I’m just making sure that each folder (or, as they used to say, directory) with photos is named starting with the date the photos were taken and a slug that tells me roughly what the photos are of. For example, 2005.07.02 - Berkeley Rose Garden.

This naming convention is simple enough and it makes it a great deal easier to cruise through my file system (either using Explorer or the Adobe Bridge application) and find specific photos.

I’m about half way through the job of normalizing my photo folder naming (since I have a new additional Seagate 250 Gigabyte hard drive, for the time being I’m not running out of space!).

A benefit is that I’m finding nice photos that I missed the first time round, like this rose from the Berkeley Rose Garden.

More of my flower photos (refresh your browser to see a new selection):

San Francisco Bay, photo by Harold Davis.

This photo is a view of the San Francisco Bay from the Albany Waterfront Trail.

What a weird place the Albany Waterfront Trail is! About a ten minute drive from here, it is on a spit of land that extends into the Bay. Until 1984, it was the municipal dump for the city of Albany, California - once again proving that we don’t tend to understand the wonderful things around us. (Why a dump in this wonderful Bay of all places?)

Today, this a park with left-over detritus from the dumping years, “shrines” made by various artists, and glorious views.

Those of us living with our families in the Bay area realize that the disaster could have been ours. I’m not posting any photos in this entry. Instead, I want to note that the Katrina Relief Group on Flickr is having some success raising money for the victims by auctioning prints by Flickr photographers. Funds raised will benefit the American Red Cross emergency fund set up for hurricane Katrina victims.

Here’s the link to my specific auction on Flickr (you can bid on a print of any of my photos that I’ve posted on Flickr or that have appeared in this blog).

You can read about the auction in the official Flickr blog, and also donate directly via the American Red Cross.

I seem to be writing about digital photography techniques, workflow, photography, and Photoshop. Here’s what I’ve written recently in Photoblog 2.0 about these things:

• Processing a Digital Photo
• Fun with Phlowrs and Photoshop
• Opening Camera RAW in Photoshop CS2
• The Evolution of Photography
• Without My Polarizer I Am Blue
• Would Ansel Like Digital?
• Shine On, Ersatz Moon
• Yosemite without People
• It’s the Lens, Baby

Wild Flowers near Thousand Islands Lake, photo by Harold Davis.

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:

• A Walk on the Wild Side
• Does the Wilderness Care about Me?
• There and Back Again

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.

In a previous post I explained the basics of my workflow for processing a digital image in Photoshop. The first step in this process is to open the image in Photoshop, use the Camera RAW adjustment dialog to process the raw image when it is imported, and save the image off as a PSD file (so you can archive the RAW original).

If you haven’t already seen it, take a look at the dialog that opens in Photoshop CS2 when you open a photo saved in Camera RAW format (shown above). It’s a great deal more powerful than the comparable dialog in CS1, and from the viewpoint of digital photographers everywhere this power and flexibility is a Very Good Thing.

Hey - don’t be put off if you haven’t been using your camera’s RAW file format. You should be. For the time being, you can just accept the default / Auto settings in the CS2 dialog, and you’ll get pretty good results — better certainly than shooting in JPEG. It’s fair to say that this window in CS2 is a complex as you need it to be, or as simple. If you are in a hurry, and don’t want to worry too much about tweaking the color balance of your image, as I’ve said, you’ll do pretty well with the Auto and default settings most of the time.

Here are some pointers to help you get started with the wonderful (but complex) RAW Settings files in cs2.

You can open a RAW photo, and get the CS2 RAW Settings dialog to open either from Photoshop itself, or from the Bridge (the new implementation of file browsing in the Photoshop universe).

First, you can save (and open) camera RAW settings. These are the .XMP files you may have seen in the same directories as your RAW images (each one is named the same as a RAW image but with a .Xmp suffix, for example DSC_0001.Nef and DSC_0001.Xmp). These files are written in XML (so you can open them in a text editor and take a look at them) . It’s useful to know about this if you have a number of images from the same batch that you want to treat in the same way.

The title bar of the RAW Settings dialog shows you Exif information for the photo: ISO, lens, and exposure.

Right below the title bar, you have controls that allow you to easily zoom in on an image, crop the image, rotate the image, straighten the image, and take a color sample.

The Histogram, in the upper right of the RAW Settings dialog, and shown to the left, is a visual representation of the spectrum of RGB color values in your photo, and will also show you the exact RGB values for any point in your image (by holding one of the controls over the point).

The Workflow Options, at the bottom of the RAW Settinsg dialog, lets you set target color space profile, bit depth, pixel dimension, and resolution. (These settings can also be changed once the image is opened in Photoshop.)

To load a previously saved RAW settings to the current photo, click the triangle to the right of the Settings drop-down list (below the histogram), and choose Load Settings from the context menu (browse for an XMP file). You can also use this context menu to save the current settings.

Now for the fun stuff! Most often, if you want to play with anything other then the default and automatic settings, you’ll want to do this with the sliders on the Adjust tab. I’ll discuss the most important of the settings these sliders control below, as well as giving you an idea of what you can do with the four tabs beneath the Adjust tab.

The Adjust tab, shown to the left, is used for tonal adjustments to a camera RAW photo. First, you can set the white balance of the photo from the drop-down list of preset white balances. White balance is the setting used to make something white appear neutral (without a color cast) in a given light. If you leave this to “As Shot,” then the camera’s white balance settings will be used. Otherwise, you can choose from Auto, Daylight, Cloudy, Shadows, Tungsten, Flouresecnt, Flash, and Custom.

Generally, you’ll find that either As Shot, or Auto does a pretty good job. But depending on the photo, you may want to tweak white balance a bit.

Temperature adjusts the color temperature on the Kelvin scale. The higher the Kelvin number, the “warmer” (more red) the image looks, and the lower the Kelvin number the “cooler” (bluer) the image.

Tint fine-tunes the white balance to compensate for a green or magenta tint. Move the slider to the left (negative values) to add green to the photo; move it to the right (positive values) to add magenta.

If you use the Temperature and Tint sliders to tweak the white balance even slightly, the drop-down white balance setting will change to Custom.

If you check the Auto box for each tonal slider, Photoshop will do its best to find the optimal tonal settings for you. Otherwise use the sliders in order from top to bottom to adjust the image as described:

• Exposure adjusts the brightness or darkness of the image. Move the slider to the left to darken the image; move it to the right to brighten the image. The values are in increments equivalent to f‑stops. An adjustment of +1.00 is similar to widening the aperture one stops. Conversely, an adjustment of –2.0 is similar to reducing the aperture 2 f-stops.
• Shadows specifies which input levels are mapped to black in the final image. Moving the slider to the right increases the areas that are mapped to black. This sometimes creates the impression of increased contrast in the image.
• Brightness adjusts the brightness or darkness of the image, much as the Exposure slider does. However, instead of changing the image in the highlights (areas that are completely white, no detail) or shadows (areas that are completely black, no detail), Brightness compresses the highlights and expands the shadows when you move the slider to the right. In general, you should use the Brightness slider to adjust the overall brightness or darkness after you set the white and black ranges with the Exposure and Shadow sliders.
• Contrast adjusts the midtones in an image. Higher values increase the midtone contrast, and lower values produce an image with less contrast. Generally, you use the Contrast slider to adjust the contrast of the midtones after setting the Exposure, Shadow, and Brightness values.
• Saturation, or color intensity, adjusts the color saturation of the image from –100 (pure monochrome) to +100 (double the saturation). No Auto check box is available for Saturation, so this is something you have to adjust manually depending on how it looks to you.

A Camera RAW image as shot has had no sharpening algorithms applied to it. The Details tab is used to adjust sharpness, essentially using the Unsharp Mask filter. You can see the impact of your sharpening on the image that you are opening, provided the Preview box is checked. The default sharpness is 25%, but can certainly see what a greater percentage will do for your image (it may look surprisingly good). (Of course, you can also apply sharpening once an image is loaded in Photoshop.)

The two other sliders on the Detail tab are used to reduce noise — the random appearance of pixels that degrade image quality and often appear when images are shot at high ISOs that are analagous to film grain.

The Luminance Smoothing slider reduces grayscale noise, which makes an image look grainy, and the Color Noise Reduction slider reduces chroma noise, which usually shows up as random colored pixels. Moving a slider to zero turns off its noise reduction.

You can use the sliders on the Lens Tab to compensate for chromatic abberation introduced by digital camera lense. One slider is used to compensate for red/cyan color fringing by adjusting the size of the red channel compared to the green channel. The other slider is used to compensate for blue/yellow color fringing by adjusting the size of the blue channel compared to the green channel.

Vignetting is a defect that causes the edges of photos — particuarly the corners — to be darker than the center of the image. (A common cause is mounting your lens shade incorrectly.)

You can use the vignetting sliders to fix a vignetting flaw — or to add some vignetting as a special effect.

The Amount slider controls how much vignetting there is (how dark it is), and the Midpoint slider controls the size of the area of the overall vignetting.

The Tone Curve tab adjusts tonality using a curves adjustment. You can use the Tone Curve menu to choose a preset adjustment. I’ll be writing more about how to use curves to adjust the tonality of an image loaded in Photoshop in a future entry.

The Calibrate tab lets you correct a color cast in the shadows and adjust non-neutral colors to compensate for the difference between the behavior of your camera and the Photoshop Camera RAW conversion built‑in profile for your camera model. Sometimes a color cast remains in the shadow areas after you adjust the highlight white balance using the Temperature and Tint sliders. The Calibrate tab has a Shadow Tint slider to correct this remaining shadow color cast.

In the Calibrate tab, move the Shadow Tint slider to remove the color cast in the shadows. Usually, moving the slider to the left (negative values) adds green to the shadow areas, and moving the slider to the right (positive values) adds magenta.

Here’s a link to an entry showing the finished photo after opening in Photoshop and processing, and saving (as a JPEG) for the web. The settings I used to open this Camera RAW photo into Photoshop were a custom Kelvin temperature of 6050 degrees, Tint +6, Exposure - 1.1, Shadows 17, Brightness 130, Contrast +25, and Saturation +24.

Before you worry about processing your photos you have to make sure you have a digital camera that’s up to the task! Don’t get stuck with old electronics the next time you want to capture a memory, do some online shopping and get the camera that’s right for you. Capture your photos with the best in color technology.

Blue, photo by Harold Davis.

This is a photo of a fingerpainting project at Nicky’s pre-school drying outside.

I took the picture in the late afternoon sun. The only thing unusual about the picture from a technique viewpoint is that I used a polarizer to deepen the colors.

As the memory of the craft of film photography begins to fade, we forget how much of color photography used to be accomplished with filters. In the digital era, the role of the many filters has been taken over by Photoshop.

But not the polarizer. You cannot easily replicate the effect of a polarizer using Photoshop. This filter rotates, and its impact changes both depending on the light and on its rotation. The polarizer deepens colors, and brings out reflections in glass and water (or diminishes them, if that is your desire). It makes skies seem dark yet translucent.

The polarizer used in this picture is the 67mm Nikon circular version that fits on the from of AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor ED 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5G IF, a mouthful of a moniker, but basically the lens most people get with a Nikon D70. But with this standard camera, and standard lens, the polarizer now has to be special ordered. People are forgeting the tools, such as a polarizer, that worked well before digital.

I also tried playing with this image in Photoshop, and came up with an abstraction that looks like a sinister bird to me:

Here are the steps I took from the original blue image in Photoshop:

1. First, of course I opened the RAW version of the blue image in Photoshop and saved it as a PSD (see Processing a Digital Image)
2. I used Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation and Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast to pump some color into the image
3. I applied the Glowing Edges filter from the Stylize section of the Filter Gallery
4. I used the Film Grain filter from the Artistic section of the Filter Gallery to add just a little grain to the image
5. I cloned out some areas that I didn’t like so much, and cloned in some of the glowing orange to make it more look like a bird
6. I used the Unsharp Filter to sharpen the image by about 100%

Was all this worth it? I had fun playing, and that is always a good thing. But I’m not sure that I don’t prefer the original blue image…

© 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?

© Harold Davis - Looking towards the Minarets from Summit Ridge, July 1, 2005

In the first part of this story, I told how an excess of enthusiasm for wilderness backpacking and a desire to try out some new digital photography equipment led me up the side of a valley hung with steep snow fields undercut with rapid waterfalls. The trail had vanished under the snow. I didn’t have an ice ax or crampons for traveling on snow and ice, and it seemed way too dangerous to go back down the way I had come.

Getting myself into this situation was possibly foolish of me. Actually, it was obviously extremely downright stupid on my part. It also showed a certain amount of inattentiveness - to the snowpack situation in the Sierras this year, and to the warning that Search-and-Rescue Billy had given me. My fixation on getting away from the kids for a few days, on being a wilderness photographer again, and reliving my life style from my twenties even though I am in my fifties had got me into a fix. Maybe that’s why “fix” is the root word in “fixation”.

Anyhow, as the day passed and I continued up and across the snow in the general direction I thought the trail would have meant to go if there hadn’t been any snow, I began to realize that I was very alone, that I was in a fix that might even be life threatening, and that I would have to figure out how to get out of it on my own.

After I got up the cliff-covered-with-snow-which-there-was-no-going-back-down, I passed Spooky Meadow. Here’s a picture:

It looked pretty spooky to me, I guess, but not like much of a meadow. A little further on, there was more snow. Hard to know which way to go, though terra firma did stick out of the snow from time to time, like in this picture of one of the Clark Lakes:

The next memorable landmark was when I slogged my way to the junction with another, somewhat less steep trail that headed back down to Gem Lake. I knew that I was at a junction with this trail because the junction sign post stuck out of the snow. Otherwise I wouldn’t have had a clue. I thought about heading down this trail. Search-and-Rescue Billy had suggested it as a less steep topography than the way I had come up. But the thought of turning around with my tail between, well between my backpack, was too much for me - I also didn’t like the idea of trying to follow a trail (a trail that didn’t really exist because it was under snow and that I didn’t know) down a steep mountain.

Had I been thinking ahead, I would also have wondered about crossing Rush Creek at the bottom of the valley near Billy Lake. (As Search-and-Rescue Billy had remarked, “nice of them to name a lake after me.”) But I wasn’t pondering the issues raised by high water crossings yet, just stuck in the mire of crossing endless snow.

Here’s a map of the area (you can click it for a larger size). The trail junction I’m talking about is 0.7 miles below Agnew Pass on the map:

By now I was getting pretty tired, and the day was getting on, but there was no place to camp. I also still had vague fantasies of making it to Thousand Islands Lake before dark, which had been my (very misguided) plan.

I continued on past a variety of snow fields, small lakes, and slopes ranging from mildly steep to pitched catastrophically into the small lakes until I was able to orient myself by an obviously heart shaped lake. You can see this lake on the map if you look hard right above the word “Summit” on the larger version of the map.

It’s clear that the trail passes over a ridge at the bottom of the heart, but it was equally clear to me that I wasn’t going to pass over this steep, slippery ridge without glissading down the snow into the little heart-shaped lake. Said lake, by the way, was half frozen and had no obvious way of egress because of steep banks if I had plunged into it, leaving me with more to worry about than the effect of ice water on my digital equipment.

Well, getting myself into this predicament may have been a foolish mid-life crisis blip kind of thing. But once there, I do have to say without boasting that my wilderness navigation skills are superb. I don’t know whether it is my eastern European Jewish ancestary, or my Native American progenitors, but I can find my way anywhere. Blind fold me, spin me round and round, I still know my directions and how to get to anyplace at all. I also know how to read a map. It’s probably not genetics at all, just one of those things that some people do and others don’t. But it’s a good skill to have if you are ever caught in a snow-clad wilderness empty of people.

So as an intrepid path finder, acclimated to sea level and not 10,000 feet elevation, carrying a fifty pound pack for the first time in years, not to mention too much bulge around my middle, I actually made a good decision. I said, no matter what I am not attempting to traverse slopes that I think may be too dangerous. That ruled out following what I deduced as thedirection of the trail. Instead I set out in the opposite direction, up a safe but do-able snow field without tremendous exposure.

The snow field led to a summit ledge that I could follow. By now I was downright exhausted. I looked around. It seemed like a pretty good place to camp, with a great view across the valley towards Banner Peak, a view of the backside of the minarets, and further off towards the south the high creast of the Sierra headed towards Mount Whitney orange in the late afternoon sun. There was also a waterfall tinkling into the valley out of one of the snow fields. Here’s what the place looked like:

I put my pack down and explored. Not fifty feet from where I had stopped, I saw the trail once again emerging from the snow. It was my first site of the trail in quite a few miles, and I found it heartening. The view down the valley in the direction I wanted to go towards Thousand Islands Lake also looked blessedly free of snow:

My spirits went up. It looked like maybe I wasn’t so crazy after all. I had a nice campsite (my yellow tent, bought on sale from Sierra Trading Post years ago and never used, went up snug and cheerful). A musical waterfall played its wonderful melody as it ran out of a snow bank and I cooked dinner. The trail ahead looked to be obvious and relatively clear of snow. As the sun set I put the Nikon D70 on my tripod and took pictures including the one at the beginning of this installment of the story and this picture:

For another picture from this camping spot, taken at dawn, see this entry.

So I should have been relatively content. It at least seemed like I’d made it through the worst and had good conditions for the walk over to Thousand Islands Lake in the morning. I had a snug, harmonious, and spectacular place to camp. But all was not right for me.

As I lay in my sleeping bag exhausted beyond belief I realized I didn’t care about the beautiful wilderness around me. After all, it didn’t care about me. Banner Peak was completely indifferent to me. Banner Peak didn’t care if I lived, or I died, or if I ever saw my family again, or if I had a pounding headache from the altitude.

And all I wanted was to be out of there. I wanted to be back at my car at the trail head. Most of all, I want to be safe and snug with my family.

This story began in A Walk on the Wild Side
It concludes in There and Back Again