High Sierra Topix

This is from a trip to Denali in 2019. My wife and I spent the first night at Wonder Lake and then the next 5 days we backpacked up the Toklat River. We got an early start the first day after the bus dropped us off at our starting point and hiked in around 6-7 miles. We paralleled one of the branches of the Toklat on our left the entire time and had been looking for a place to cross as there wasn't much terrain to our right as we were up against a mountain range with not many places to camp. We found what looked like the most promising place to cross and gave it go. It didn't go well.

Anyways, we made our way to the other side of the river and setup camp and dried out all our gear that wasn't in a dry bag. There was no way we were going to cross back over that branch when we hiked out, so we decided that we needed to scout out an exit route so the next morning we hiked back to road to make sure we could actually reach the road for when we needed to exit. I left all of my camera gear at camp and we set off. It turned out that we could make it back to the road and near the road there were about 10 stream crossings, none of them difficult.

We reached the road and turned around to hike back to camp. After crossing the last of the streams we hiked up a bank and put on our shoes. I finished lacing up and turned around, saw this, and my jaw dropped. I couldn't believe how insanely gorgeous the view was. I remember blindly reaching for my camera that wasn't there. I may have swore just a little bit. But I made due with my cell phone

SirBC, that is truly a gorgeous photo! I'm especially impressed with the bits of blue sky :-). We spent four days at Denali (3 of them at Wonder Lake) in 2008 and saw nothing but leaden skies, with the cloud bases at about 4000 feet. They lightly rained and sometimes snowed on us on and off.
-Phil

Thanks Phil, we really did luck out with the weather

From a backpacking trip in the Coast Mountains, British Columbia.


Witness by David Young, on Flickr

Four images from my recent north coast redwoods trip that am slowly working through tedious post processing for. View of coastal redwoods along Howland Hill Road. Downsized from 6400x5000 pixel stitch and focus stack blended original.

(mouse select to enlarge) Rhododendron were spotty this spring and likely peaking now in mid June. Crop from larger image. Yes coastal bluff wildflowers were awesome even in this drought year later May. A small storm refreshed coastal areas down to the Mendocino area during the week I was about Del Norte that delivered a late bloom of goldfields amid the drying sea pink and peaking lupines plus poppies. Ocean water late morning in this zone has a glorious aqua color. Downsized from 6500x6000 pixel stitch and focus stack blended original. Went back the next week after the holiday on a one nighter and shot this plus worked several flower close-ups. Downsized from 6600x6000 pixel stitch and focus stack blended original. [/color]

Reviving this thread with a photo from a fall 2018 trip to the Italian Dolomites. This was taken from a dayhike around the Tres Cime. Spectacular scenery, but there were hundreds of people on that trail that day. Fortunately, this part of the Dolomites does not have ski lifts and gondolas everywhere.
-Phil

Eaglecap Wilderness

The Eagle Cap Wilderness photo looks like Sierra. I guess, glacier-sculpted granite landscape looks like that.

tomba wrote: ↑Tue Nov 05, 2024 9:25 pm The Eagle Cap Wilderness photo looks like Sierra. I guess, glacier-sculpted granite landscape looks like that.

Check out the pic with the goats the Eaglecap really is a bizarre mixture of geology in very close proximity! a few miles to the north of these pics is the Matterhorn--a mostly marble peak. This pic of the Matterhorn was taken labor day weekend in 2007 just after an epic afternoon thunderstorm.

Very nice !! I like the lake photo a lot, but getting a photo of those goats must have been really fun.