I know I said I’d be posting more winter shots, but this one got away and really wanted to post it. While visiting San Francisco, California, a buddy and I were heading back home after some sunset shooting of the Golden Gate Bridge when we drove by a scenic shot of downtown catching dusk colors above it. I begged and pleaded for him to stop the car and when it finally got him to pull over on the side of the road after parking legal parking attempts failed, I ran out of the car and had just enough time, and color in the sky, to catch this shot.

As mentioned in a couple of earlier posts, I had never heard of Lassen Volcanic National Park before Ken Burns’ National Park series, however after looking into it a bit I put it high up on my list of places to see on my road trip I started two months ago today. Lassen Volcanic National Park immediately became one of my favorite places along the trip and a place I’d love to get back to soon. While there I did the King’s Creek Falls trail which is a very scenic trail along King’s Creek that climaxes at a 30 foot waterfall.

On one of the nights I was in Yosemite National Park I headed up to the Tunnel View Overlook to get my shots from that scene that have become quite famous by now. With no clouds in the sky, I was hoping for some nice colors in the sky itself, which I got a little bit of, but not quite as much as I was hoping. I was also planning on sticking around till after dark but I wasn’t quite prepared for the cold so this was one of the last shots I got before heading back to camp.

One of the hikes I did during my stay in Yosemite National Park was to Upper Yosemite Falls. The easy thing about it was the trail started practically right in Camp 4, which was where I was staying that night. I also wound up timing the hike just right getting there right before a couple of spectacular rainbows vanished due to the fading light. It’s a great hike and provides some great views of Yosemite Valley as well along the way. Definitely a highlight during my wonderful stay in Yosemite National Park, but as always, way too short!

I’ve finally gotten around to stitching together some of the panoramas taken along the trip I returned from a few weeks ago. This is from the spectacular sunset that lit up the sky over the Alabama Hills in southern California. In the background are the Inyo Mountains. Though I’m quite anxious to make another trip down to Southern Utah and Northern Arizona, the Alabama Hills are also high up on my list of places I’d like to return to at some point in the near future.

After running from the dust storm in Death Valley National Park, I made my way down Joshua Tree National Park where the wind was just as brutal, but given that I was now 4000 feet higher, it was much colder. I was fortunate enough to meet up with a couple of other Jackson Hole residents and we all wound up against the weather and decided to head into town for dinner. This shot was at dusk just before leaving the Ryan Campground. Joshua Tree National Park is definitely a very fun place to visit and I’m sure I’ll be back there at some point. I just hope the weather’s a bit more cooperative next time.

Unfortunately my experience in Death Valley National Park was a little short-lived as a big front came storming in the morning I arrived. There wasn’t much precipitation, and I wasn’t really expecting it either given that Death Valley only gets about two inches per year, however what came with the front was quite a bit of wind. Gusts got up to roughly 65-70mph, and with wind that high in the desert, you can expect a dust storm. Most of things I was most looking forward to in Death Valley were engulfed in a dust storm that I wasn’t willing to hang around three days to wait out. Instead I did the two things that didn’t seem to be affected by the wind, which was the Artist’s Drive Loop and this quick and easy hike, the Gold Canyon Trail. The violent uplift and colliding of plates is very evident throughout this two mile round-trip hike as pretty much everything you see is on some sort of slant.

As I mentioned in the previous post, the sunrise on the morning I woke up at the Alabama Hills was the best sunrise on the whole trip. Not only that, this is the kind of light that photographers are up at the cracks of dawn to see — when the whole sky is lit up in some warm color, in this case pink and purple, and it reflects onto the ground painting everything visible in that same light. On this particular morning, it only lasted a few seconds and looking over to the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains this was the only shot I was able to get. That happened partly because I was also in the middle of breaking down camp, which went very slow considering the circumstances.

If sunset at the Alabama Hills was the most dramatic sunset of the trip, sunrise the next day was easily the most memorable as well. I woke up to an incredible display of color surrounding me literally in every direction. The Sierra Nevada Mountains were completely lit up in pastel colors. The most amazing part of it was that every single other person in the campground was sound asleep during the whole show.

This is another taken from the campgrounds at the Alabama Hills along the Eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. The temperature at night only got down into the 40s so it made for excellent camping weather. The great thing about the Alabama Hills is you’re at roughly 5000 feet above sea level, and just to the west are some of the country’s highest peaks. In addition to all the boulders that make for a great foreground, the high desert and snow-capped peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains is also quite an intriguing subject.