Great Western Divide. Sequoia National Park. August 2, 2010. © Copyright 2010 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.
Sierra Nevada backcountry near the Great Western Divide
The back story to this photograph could end up being quite long, but I’ll try to constrain it a bit. First, credit to my friend David Hoffman, whose recent effort to share a bunch of his black and white photographs has inspired me to share a few of mine that haven’t been public before, and to go back to some older images that have languished in my raw file archives and do the work necessary to bring them to the light of day. This is one of those photograph, from a trip into a wonderful and remote section of the Southern Sierra that I undertook with group of friends over four years ago. The general area is one that I had long wanted to visit, since a strange college backpacking trip that had one of the lakes in the area as its objective, but which was derailed when my buddies and I realized that we were not up the rather intense trip we had embarked upon, and we ended up revising our trip in mid-stream — and we ended up many miles away from here. On this 2010 trip, many decades later, I finally got into this area that I had thought about during the intervening years.
The actual target destination on this 2010 trip was a particular alpine lake that I had been curious about since that original visit. We did go to that lake, a high barren lake above timberline, on this trip. Ironically, that destination from so many years ago did not particularly excite me when we got there — we stayed briefly and then moved on. But the place we ended up after that was very special. We looped into an area far up in the upper drainage of the Kern River, a location that is off the beaten track and clearly not visited that often. Our campsite near the location of this photograph showed virtually no signs of previous visits, a rare thing in the Sierra. This beautiful landscape of timberline lakes and meadows, perhaps my favorite sort of Sierra place, sits at the base of huge alpine canyons leading to massive and rugged summits. Fortunately, its remoteness and the difficulty of the approach is likely to sustain the solitude of the place.
G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist whose subjects include the Pacific coast, redwood forests, central California oak/grasslands, the Sierra Nevada, California deserts, urban landscapes, night photography, and more.
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