Goin' Up The Country

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I'm gonna leave this city

Got to get away...

The Jeep didn't fill with the sound of Canned Heat's song Goin' Up The Country until I was on the way home, but it's okay since I was still in the Sierras, just coming out of Yosemite after another two-day nature photography binge.

Tioga Pass had opened, and it was still a week before the kick-off of the official summer crowd season on Memorial Day weekend. It was now or never, and I've been thinking for months about going all the way out to the Eastern Sierra, to Bishop, to look for the so-called Sky Rock petroglyph site before the summer heat sets in. I'll save you the frustration as a reader that I experienced on my trip by telling you right now that . . . I didn't find it! Details below.

After another wee-hour drive across the valley I arrived at Yosemite in time for sunrise. Somehow I'd never stopped at this viewpoint before. Always drove by with nothing more than a quick glance. Most of the few people who passed by at that hour did likewise. Except for a couple of quick-stoppers I had the place to myself. Just me and a canyon wren trilling below.

As I waited to see whether the sun would break through the clouds in a dramatic way I ran the timelapse you see at the top of this post. I let the thing run until I figured I had a much longer clip than what I actually got. All that automatic shutter-clicking can get on one's nerves. Too bad you can't run the timelapse from Live View.

I did remember the Big Meadow fire-aftermath images this time. I forgot to bring them on my trip a couple of weeks ago and had no hope of finding the same vantage point to shoot an update. I found the vantage points this time all right, but it was actually too early in the day. I waited quite a while for the shadows to work their way up the hillside, but I didn't want to wait around all day.

I could see this lupine meadow from the vantage point area, so I headed over there after grabbing my 2013 update shots (continuing the series of 2009 and 2011 shots).

I started to head down into Yosemite Valley but had my attention diverted before I got there by something in the forest that was bright red. I knew instantly what they were.

Snow plants. I'd seen a nice batch on my last visit but was unable to stop anywhere near them. This patch was much closer to a pull-out.

By the time I was done with the snow plants I was ready to head up to Tioga Pass. When I saw cars pulled over up near Crane Flat I pulled over and got my big lens out. There's only one reason so many cars are pulled over at that spot. In this case there were two reasons, a mother with her cub, but the cub stayed hidden at the edge of the forest. I only got a couple of frames before mama'd had enough of us gawking at her and led her cub deeper into the woods.

It was getting to be mid-day and the light wasn't so great, but I couldn't resist stopping to photograph this meadow full of shooting stars. Just as I'd stopped when I saw other cars stopped for the bear, almost as soon as I pulled over, two other cars pulled over. They all watched me step gingerly cross the seepy meadow to take a picture. Now I knew how that mama bear felt.

Out along Tioga Road I was surprised to see such a profusion of Mountain Pride Penstemon so early in the season. I stopped for some nice patches along the roadside, only to discover some better patches hidden on some boulders facing away from the road.

I don't always make a stop at Olmsted Point. Sometimes it's just too crowded, or the light's too harsh and the sky too plain. This time it was worth a stop. I still didn't think I'd make any photographs, but I ended up making three, starting with this view along the prostrate trunk of a juniper tree toward distant Half Dome.

This Jeffrey Pine always has lots of company, and I had to bide my time to photograph it without anyone in the frame.

Still no cables up at Half Dome.

While I was out here on the edge of Tenaya Lake, another photographer showed up -- a distinguished, fit-looking, white-bearded gentleman with a camera backpack much like my own, joined by his wife. They looked like famous people.

There was a bit of hail off and on throughout the afternoon. Here in the distance you can see a fresh layer of white on the top of Mount Gibbs.

I had actually planned to hike up to Gaylor Lakes from Tioga Pass, but I was after ice, and there seemed to be very little to be had. Tenaya Lake had been completely ice-free. There was quite a bit more ice and snow this time last year, when my attempt to reach Gaylor Lakes was stymied. This time I brought my snow shoes, but now I didn't need them. I decided to save Gaylor Lakes for another year.

I made the obligatory stop at the Nunatak Nature Trail to look for pikas but had no luck. These little underwater plants in the pond's outflow stream caught my attention, though, with their pretty little exhalations of air bubbles.

Next stop, Mono Lake.

Cute little two-toned waterleafs.

And wee monkey flowers.

I staked out this tufa-topped osprey nest for longer than I care to admit, hoping one of its parents would fly in with a fish caught at nearby June Lake. The longer I waited, the more I had to keep waiting. With so much time already invested, I couldn't quit empty-handed. I'd been sitting, then lying down, in the shade of a tufa tower to hide in the landscape's "negative space" and be less obvious than if I'd been in the bright sun. Eventually I was too cold to stay still, and I got up to stand in the sun. More and more time went by, and still nothing. All of a sudden, the baby who'd been sitting in the nest all this time finally got as impatient as I was feeling myself and launched into the air! "I'm fledged!" It wheeled around the nest a few times before settling back in for a landing. Nicely done. Your parents -- if they ever return -- will be proud.

Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus.

I wanted to get a different angle on the gravel bar, but this was the best I could do without my shadow getting in the frame.

A plain shot of an unusual place.

A couple of lenticular clouds made a brief appearance before dissipating like steam over a cup of coffee. (Could a master barista make lenticular clouds appear over a cup of coffee?)

Although I still do lots of focus-stacking with my new D800, I have yet to do any exposure blending, and I very rarely use my graduated neutral density filters. The dynamic range is incredible. What I'd hoped to better show in this image, though, is the little rainbow-colored sundog over on the left.

Another plain old snapshot, but I simply could not walk past this scene without making a photograph.

I probably have other images very much like this one already, but again, how can one resist?

Here was the big Mono Lake surprise-of-the-day for me. I'd seen some goose scat earlier in the day, but I shrugged it off. "Naw. Couldn't be." But then I saw them: Canada geese -- with little goslings -- foraging along the shore between South Tufa and Navy Beach. It's amazing to realize they were able to hide their nest and their chicks from all the predators that must nose around the area.

Did I mention there were geese at Mono Lake?!

Although I had cat-napped a couple of times during the day, when I finally curled up for the night in the back of the Jeep over at Navy Beach, I went out like a light. Nature (photography) called around 1 a.m. or so, just as the moon was getting ready to set behind the Sierra crest.

About a half-hour after the moon disappeared, it was finally dark enough to make some pictures. The direct beam from my flashlight was too harsh, so I shined it through tiny cracks between my fingers. I guess the red cast is due to the physics of light passing through slits, but that's probably not right. Maybe the attenuated light just has a lower wavelength. Okay, I'll stop guessing now. Because the sand tufas are just a few feet high, I had to photograph them from up close. I couldn't just set the lens at infinity and get both the tufa and the stars in focus, so I exposed one frame each for the tufa and the stars, then combined the two.

After I'd shot the sand tufa I drove over to the South Tufa and mosied down the path, marveling. At the lights. No, they weren't UFOs. They were two other photographers. Back in the early 80s I'd be the only one out there on any given day. Now I can't get the place to myself even at three o'clock in the morning! I finished up at Mono Lake around 4 a.m. One photographer was still down there. Two more drove up to the parking lot just as I got back to the Jeep. The sky was already too bright for night photography, yet sunrise was still quite a long way off. That's the way it goes sometimes. Hurry up and wait.

Starry night.

Since I was already up, I made something to eat, then began the drive down to Bishop. I thought I was fine, but when I started having little hallucinations -- like seeing deer along the side of I-395 that weren't actually there -- I realized I needed another cat nap. I pulled over at a vista point, grabbed the pillow from the back, laid my head down on the center console and promptly fell asleep.

Although I had printed out a couple of pictures of the Sky Rock petroglyphs to aid in my search, I'd forgotten to bring them! What is it with forgetting to bring my photo references?! All I knew about how to find the petroglyphs is that they were located on a tableland above Chalk Bluff Road. I figured I could simply find the trail and follow the tracks, and that's exactly what I did. I followed a few sets of tracks, in fact, but none led me to the magical petroglyph site.

I hiked the steep climb up the chalky bluffs around 7 a.m. and didn't go back down until I ran out of water a little after 10 a.m. I scoured the rocky outcrop and even found a "fake" Sky Rock. The big smooth rock in the lower left above must have been irresistible to some modern prankster. I could see several lightly pecked glyphs on it, but they set off my bullpucky detector.

Here's a closer view of the two most obvious fake glyphs from the rock.

As I trailed one set of tracks after another and scoured the landscape from as high up as I could climb, I felt as if I were within just a few steps of the legendary Sky Rock. And yet, I could not find it. Part of me hopes I wasn't even in the right general area! I mean, I could have hiked up the bluffs at the wrong place. There's a lot of space up there on the table land. 

In any case, it was a beautiful landscape to explore. I took extra care with each step among the jumbled rocks, knowing that to become incapacitated out there would turn me into raven food in short order. (There was even a nest nearby.) I couldn't leave empty-handed, so I photographed some natural rock art such as tafoni holes and an obsidian nail. I would love to know the geological story of how that obsidian -- essentially a piece of glass -- ended up between a rock and a hard place without being crushed into tiny shards.

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Forest Mysteries

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What I really wanted to find when I woke up this morning was a sunny day so I could re-shoot Mile Rock Beach at low tide with a blue sky. Instead I looked out the window and saw a foggy white-out. Plan B was to head out to the north side of Mt. Tam and look for Clarkia concinna, or Red Ribbons. But as I lay in bed I thought, "Do I really want to drive all the way out there to look for a single wildflower?" I thought it in a way that made me think of a blog about depression that I'd read the other day, and which I could relate to. Luckily, when my brain is being naughty I can still remember that actually doing stuff is always better than thinking about doing stuff, and that being out in nature always makes me feel good.

So I made the drive, all right. I got sidetracked photographing Blue Dicks, and then did some horsing around with dewdrops on horsetail leaves before remembering why I'd stopped there in the first place. Red ribbons.

But there were no red ribbons. The hillside where they've shown up in the past was basically nothing but dry, brown grass. Quite a contrast with the dew-kissed lushness of the horsetail forest.

So I poked around a bit more among the horsetail stalks. The angular light coming in through the forest canopy added a nice touch of mystery or drama to the cool, sunny morning.

I like the sort-of Central American design motif along the stalk.

As long as I was down there I figured I'd photograph the Hedge Nettle, and while I was doing that I spotted a few little stinkbugs snoozing away. You can see two of them tucked in near the stalk in this shot.When they woke up as the sun struck the plant, one of them excreted a tiny drop of honeydew. All I could think was, "Dang, I missed the shot."

Once again, the folks at Bug Guide identified him right away. Note the square stem of the plant. Pretty weird, but a characteristic of plants in the mint family. Though you can't see it from this angle, at the base of the empty calyx to the left of the plant bug are four little "nutlets" -- another mint characteristic, and something you'd never see if you didn't stop to take a very close look.

This little spider was catching nothing but rays and colorful spectra, strung between a couple of trees about six feet off the ground.

Up the hill along Bolinas Ridge, this little bee was loading up on Bead Lily pollen. A bicyclist came over to ask what the flowers were, and I told him Clintonia, and when he asked for the common name I thought it didn't have one. Only when I got home and looked it up did my memory jog.

Clintonia gets its common name from the beautiful blue berry it produces when it's done flowering.

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Opening Day

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I was wheels-up and flying across the valley (in the Jeep, you know) by 3:30 Friday morning. Destination: Yosemite National Park and opening day for the Glacier Point Road. I landed at the Big Oak Flat entrance about three hours later, at 6:40. The entrance station was still unstaffed, so I didn't get to use my Yosemite pass. It would be unstaffed again when I left the park to head home about 16 hours later.

My first stop was the Tuolumne Grove of giant sequoias, where I'd hoped to photograph delicate dogwood trees flowering among stout redwoods. I quickly covered the mile or so hike down to the grove to reach it before the direct sunlight struck. It was a close call, but I made it. Unfortunately, the pickings were kind of slim for dogwoods, and I didn't find what I'd hoped for. You can't complain about any time spent among giant sequoias, but I couldn't help thinking it was probably much more impressive down at Giant Sequoia National Park.

These little orange-peel fungi kept beckoning to me, even though I was in kind of a rush to try to catch whatever was left of the good morning light. I scanned every patch I passed along the trail until I spotted a specimen that finally convinced me to stop.

The plan for my next photo stop was to visit a pull-out along the edge of Big Meadow, where I've photographed the burn site in a way to compare its comeback as the years progress since the fire. I shot there in 2009 and 2011, and looked forward to getting 2013 under my belt. I printed out the previous years' pictures so I could find the exact spots. Unfortunately, I'd left the print-outs at home! Agh!

Guess I'll just have to go back up. Anyway, a little distance past my pull-out, I spotted all these bushy lupines going off like gangbusters. I felt like I had arrived at the very tail end of the good light, so it was actually lucky that I hadn't lost that time by shooting my fire-succession project.

It's funny, but I don't recall there being much scent among all these lupine. I didn't think to put my nose right up to them, but some lupines have a very sweet smell. Scent or not, they were attracting troops of bumblebees.

I was psyched to find one of my favorite wildflowers of all, the Harlequin Lupine.

From Big Meadow I continued into the valley and made Bridalveil Falls my first stop. The viewing area at the base of the falls was quite wet, so I poked around the creek, then backtracked to get a vantage point from the other side of the creek. You can make out the waterfall in the background of the photo above.

Someone on the Calphoto e-mail group had mentioned seeing bleeding hearts at Bridalveil, so I had my eyes peeled for them. I could photograph these in my back yard, but I like to photograph places, not just individual subjects. My thought is to create a body of work over a period of years that becomes my Yosemite (or Mt. Tam, or wherever).

Bright mid-day light was crashing the party by the time I left Bridalveil Falls, but I couldn't resist photographing Yosemite Falls from a spot along the Merced River -- filled to the brim with spring run-off -- that was new to me (but obviously not to others; you could see the "photographer trail" quite clearly). As I shot, I thought about all the other photographers who probably also decided to place the falls right between the two pine trees.

I figured I'd spend the mid-day hours poking around Mirror Lake, so I loaded all my photo gear and set out on the mile-long paved trail. I didn't see much I wanted to shoot, but I did stop for this Balsamroot since it was pretty much the only wildflower in bloom.

Up closer to Mirror Lake I spotted this weird-looking she-bug fluttering down from the sky. She landed on a high branch, but I was able to capture her with my 500mm. I also had my SB-400 flash on an extension cable to throw some fill-light in there. The good folks at Bug Guide told me she's a gravid Giant Stonefly. Pretty cool!

I hung out at Mirror Lake for a while. The light was impossible, and wind rippled the mirror finish off the lake's surface, so I didn't do any photography. There was beaver sign -- a cottonwood had been recently gnawed until it fell over -- but I didn't get lucky enough to see them. This is apparently not the work of our native mountain beaver, by the way. Anyway, I left Mirror Lake and found a nice bit of shade near a vernal pool along the Northside Drive where I lay in the grass, watched a pair of climbers progress up El Capitan on a route east of The Nose, and photographed this Western Sweet Violet.

After a while I decided to finally head up toward Glacier Point since the road had supposedly just been opened. I was dismayed to see that all the road signs in the valley, and even at the start of Glacier Point Road, said the road was closed. "Ugh!" I thought. "I came a week too early!" Luckily, the road signs just hadn't been changed yet. Lots of people were making the trip out there. The light was kind of blah when I arrived, so I cat-napped in the Jeep until it got better. In the photo above, check out the two hikers on the top of Half Dome. The cables haven't been put up yet, so they went up commando-style.

Here are the two hikers from the shot. 

Looks like one is facing the camera, but I can't tell if he's smiling.

I'd never really stopped at Washburn Point before. I kind of liked it, although it didn't have the "classic" view of Half Dome that shows more of its face.

The roar of Vernal and Nevada falls easily carried up to the overlook.

I shot this panorama from Washburn Point. Although most of my post-processing workflow isn't significantly slowed down by the new D800E files, this panorama sure took its time! I folded my laundry while it cranked away, and it was still going when I was done, so I made another cup of coffee. The native size of the print is about 30x60 inches.

What can I say? Frickin' gorgeous!

I resisted the temptation to take millions of shots of the same gorgeous landscape and took a break to photograph some beautifully flowering manzanita bushes nearby. This bush was right next to the road, and my lens was pointed in the direction of the road for this shot. Half Dome, etc., was at my back. A car drove by, and I heard laughter come out the open window. I had to wonder if they thought it was funny that I was pointing my camera the wrong way, shooting some of the most common flowers in the Sierra while True Grandeur was unfolding behind me.

But I was just biding my time.

I took another break after the sunset faded and caught another cat-nap in the Jeep as I waited for the stars to come out. I'm not very happy with the shot of Half Dome, even without the airplanes flying toward San Franciso (red lights off the port side, green off the starboard). You really want to use a wide-angle lens. I used a 50mm for this shot, and even at 30 seconds you can see too much star movement. (Plus it just looks kind of weird and flat, but hey, it was dark!)

I actually prefer this shot of a pair of Ponderosa Pines that were right across the street. After this shot I packed up and started turning the wheels toward home. I fortified myself with a stop at McDonald's in Oakdale which is open 24 hours (though I was 15 minutes too late for service in the lobby, which stops at midnight, and had to use the drive-thru), and was sustained by music turned way up. I was amazed that all the music was shit-kicking rock-n-roll. I have lots of mellow music and classical on my iPod, but none of it was playing. I thought I was unaccountably lucky until the next day, as I was driving back from the grocery store, still hearing rock music all the way, and realized I'd been listening to my "Fire Sticks" playlist. I finally got home in time to give my wife a fright as I walked in the door and woke her up at around 2:30 in the morning. 

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