Eastern Sierra aspens. With BW film and a yellow filter the bright yellow leaves glow with a brilliant luminance. There is no direct sunlight in this image, the contrast comes from color separation. Ilford Delta 100 BW film, yellow #8, F/11.

The air is crisp and cool. A frost coats the rocks and grasses as I walk past in the early morning. At ten thousand feet my lungs feel the effort already and the sun hasn’t risen yet. The deep blue light reveals little: the edge of the high ridgeline above me with its blanket of stars sparkling above, the dark yellow of aspen along the trail, the long still lake off to my right. It’s autumn in the High Sierra, October 17, 2023. I’m heading over Bishop Pass and down into Dusy Basin to photograph for the day. No clouds this morning, so the air is chilled with that predawn coolness. My pack is light for a change, only camera gear, no bedding or bear canister, no stove or pounds of food. Just camera, film, tripod, and some snacks. This time of year is magnificent in the mountains. Gone are the summer crowds. There’s an air of winter expectation. Snow could happen at anytime, but the fullness of that season is still a little ways off. The light has already started dipping south, so the intensity of noon alpine sun is lessened. As I leave the ecotone of the upper montane forest, the aspens disappear, replaced with my high altitude companion the white bark pine and its symbiotic partner, the Clark’s nutcracker. I stop along a cliffside; a distant waterfall thrums a hypnotic embrace and above me, high amongst the branches, the bird taps to find its nut. I could stand here all day, my brain tingling in these sounds, but I suppose a pass must be crossed, and images must be made. The trees soon leave and I’m buried in alpine clarity. Insolation, the amount of solar radiation, is higher at altitude with its lack of water vapor, carbon dioxide, and particulate matter. The air up here scatters, rather than reflects, light. The results are the rich deep hues of the Sierra alpine world. John Muir’s range of light indeed.

No clouds today. Clouds to a landscape photographer are like good salt to a chef: an almost necessity. Without clouds, I work the early morning light with its long shadows, and the first hints of sunrise kissing distant peaks. At the twelve thousand foot pass, I drop my pack and wander around. The sun is full now and I do some tonality studies of Mt. Agassiz just east of the pass. I pack up and continue south, dropping into a garden of white bark and foxtails, tarns and boulder fields. I stoop down and drink raw from a stream. If I can’t do that here, well, then. My birthday is this week and it feels good to be celebrating up here, in solitude, in my own way, in my landscape country.

***Coming down from Bishop Pass after walking 16 miles. The clouds finally starting building and under late afternoon light. Ilford Delta 100 BW film, minus-blue #12, polarizer, F/16.***

A week later, I’m back home in Oregon and up in the Three Sisters Wilderness to shoot. I ascend to Green Lakes and then overland to a high ridgeline along the flanks of Broken Top Mountain. Like down south in the Sierra, the air has that cool expectation of darker weather ahead. The streamside shrubs are bright yellow and orange. The light is long, and high overhead icy cirrus flow in beautiful tonalities. I’m after a specific scene, I want to get high enough so I can see the Three Sisters mountains. I want to capture them alone with a grand expanse of clouded sky to support it. I reach the ridge and walk up a ways to find an outcropping of rock that falls off abruptly on its northern edge. I set up the tripod, frame the scene, and sit to wait for the clouds to build. This is a good kind of waiting. Creative waiting. Expectation. Waiting can dull the energy that comes from having to work quickly, but not today. Today I’m in the mood for stillness, for good nature meditations. I brought my journal to write in, but it stays in my pack, I just sit and stare, lost to the world without. It’s one reason I come to the mountains. The clouds take their time to build and I capture a few frames. Time moves slowly, but too soon it’s late afternoon and I have a six mile walk ahead of me and no headlamp. I want to capture some of the lower landscapes, so I load up and start my descent, stopping in a dense hemlock forest and along the stream coming off the lakes below to shoot more. I reach the trailhead after sunset, but still in light enough to see. This is the most alluring season of the year.

Autumn in the Mountains