Grouse Creek, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

The snow starts falling in the Yosemite winter, first gently and then with insistence. Hours—or days—into the blizzard everything is white. Maybe there are a few shades of gray. But the world is essentially monchromatic. Color is a merely a memory evoked by a few details in this photograph: the rock behind the waterfall, the brown tint of the trunks of the trees on the lower left, and the green of fir trees showing through the whiteness.