Back in August I spent a week base-camping in the Eastern Sierra with a group of fellow photographers.* We were more or less emulating another group that I've been associated with that had been traveling into the Sierra backcountry for a couple of decades. (There's a book: First Light: Five Photographers Explore Yosemite's Wilderness. There are some Youtube videos of the group floating around, too.) And, of course THAT group was following in the footsteps of previous such endeavors, including some involving some guy named Ansel.
The basic idea is to use pack train support to get a group of photographers (and all of the gear that they/we typically might want to use) into suitably target-rich backcountry locations where they/we would spend a week (sometimes longer in the past) photographing the heck out of the wilderness neighborhood. This year's trip came about when one of the participants (who no longer can backpack, despite decades of serious backcountry experience) saw one of my Sierra photographs and lamented that he could no longer go to such places. I replied and said, "You know, there are pack trains." He jumped at the opportunity, and soon the rest of the trip came together.
I won't tell the whole story here since this forum is more about photographs than the stories, but it was an "interesting" week. Literally moments after we arrived at our base camp and set up tents, the skies let loose with the heaviest torrential rain and hail that I've encountered in decades in the backcountry. We went straight into tents, where we stayed for the next few hours as everyone nearby flooded. A small creek below our campsite rose several FEET, and a nearby blue lake turned brown from the sediment-laden runoff. The rain continued off and on for the first 24 hours and didn't really start to clear until the following evening. (A couple of the photographs are from that second evening.)
Anyway, some pictures... (There are more, and I may be back to add a few later.)
Back in August I spent a week base-camping in the Eastern Sierra with a group of fellow photographers.* We were more or less emulating another group that I've been associated with that had been traveling into the Sierra backcountry for a couple of decades. (There's a book: First Light: Five Photographers Explore Yosemite's Wilderness. There are some Youtube videos of the group floating around, too.) And, of course THAT group was following in the footsteps of previous such endeavors, including some involving some guy named Ansel.
The basic idea is to use pack train support to get a group of photographers (and all of the gear that they/we typically might want to use) into suitably target-rich backcountry locations where they/we would spend a week (sometimes longer in the past) photographing the heck out of the wilderness neighborhood. This year's trip came about when one of the participants (who no longer can backpack, despite decades of serious backcountry experience) saw one of my Sierra photographs and lamented that he could no longer go to such places. I replied and said, "You know, there are pack trains." He jumped at the opportunity, and soon the rest of the trip came together.
I won't tell the whole story here since this forum is more about photographs than the stories, but it was an "interesting" week. Literally moments after we arrived at our base camp and set up tents, the skies let loose with the heaviest torrential rain and hail that I've encountered in decades in the backcountry. We went straight into tents, where we stayed for the next few hours as everyone nearby flooded. A small creek below our campsite rose several FEET, and a nearby blue lake turned brown from the sediment-laden runoff. The rain continued off and on for the first 24 hours and didn't really start to clear until the following evening. (A couple of the photographs are from that second evening.)
Anyway, some pictures... (There are more, and I may be back to add a few later.)
Dan
* The group included Michael Frye, Claudia Welsh Franka Gabler, David Hoffman, Jerry Bosworth, my wife Patricia Emerson Mitchell, and [url=http://www.gdanmitchell.com/]me[/url.
Back in August I spent a week base-camping in the Eastern Sierra with a group of fellow photographers.* We were more or less emulating another group that I've been associated with that had been traveling into the Sierra backcountry for a couple of decades. (There's a book: First Light: Five Photographers Explore Yosemite's Wilderness. There are some Youtube videos of the group floating around, too.) And, of course THAT group was following in the footsteps of previous such endeavors, including some involving some guy named Ansel.
The basic idea is to use pack train support to get a group of photographers (and all of the gear that they/we typically might want to use) into suitably target-rich backcountry locations where they/we would spend a week (sometimes longer in the past) photographing the heck out of the wilderness neighborhood. This year's trip came about when one of the participants (who no longer can backpack, despite decades of serious backcountry experience) saw one of my Sierra photographs and lamented that he could no longer go to such places. I replied and said, "You know, there are pack trains." He jumped at the opportunity, and soon the rest of the trip came together.
I won't tell the whole story here since this forum is more about photographs than the stories, but it was an "interesting" week. Literally moments after we arrived at our base camp and set up tents, the skies let loose with the heaviest torrential rain and hail that I've encountered in decades in the backcountry. We went straight into tents, where we stayed for the next few hours as everyone nearby flooded. A small creek below our campsite rose several FEET, and a nearby blue lake turned brown from the sediment-laden runoff. The rain continued off and on for the first 24 hours and didn't really start to clear until the following evening. (A couple of the photographs are from that second evening.)
Anyway, some pictures... (There are more, and I may be back to add a few later.)
Back in August I spent a week base-camping in the Eastern Sierra with a group of fellow photographers.* We were more or less emulating another group that I've been associated with that had been traveling into the Sierra backcountry for a couple of decades. (There's a book: First Light: Five Photographers Explore Yosemite's Wilderness. There are some Youtube videos of the group floating around, too.) And, of course THAT group was following in the footsteps of previous such endeavors, including some involving some guy named Ansel.
The basic idea is to use pack train support to get a group of photographers (and all of the gear that they/we typically might want to use) into suitably target-rich backcountry locations where they/we would spend a week (sometimes longer in the past) photographing the heck out of the wilderness neighborhood. This year's trip came about when one of the participants (who no longer can backpack, despite decades of serious backcountry experience) saw one of my Sierra photographs and lamented that he could no longer go to such places. I replied and said, "You know, there are pack trains." He jumped at the opportunity, and soon the rest of the trip came together.
I won't tell the whole story here since this forum is more about photographs than the stories, but it was an "interesting" week. Literally moments after we arrived at our base camp and set up tents, the skies let loose with the heaviest torrential rain and hail that I've encountered in decades in the backcountry. We went straight into tents, where we stayed for the next few hours as everyone nearby flooded. A small creek below our campsite rose several FEET, and a nearby blue lake turned brown from the sediment-laden runoff. The rain continued off and on for the first 24 hours and didn't really start to clear until the following evening. (A couple of the photographs are from that second evening.)
Anyway, some pictures... (There are more, and I may be back to add a few later.)
