Photographic meanderings

Aspen foliage at the top of Lee Vining Canyon, just outside Yosemite National Park.

Manzanar’s history is too complex to reduce to black and white–other than this: incarcerating Japanese-Americans was a violation of human rights, civil rights and is a matter of national shame. No matter how orderly, civil, and artisticly permissive the camp was, it was wrong to confine human beings there based simply on their race. It is a black mark on our heritage that will never be reduced to shades of gray. It was pure black, through and through.

This arrangement presented itself to me as I returned from the salt flats of Badwater, Death Valley.

Salt flats under unusual clouds.

Early Morning visitors await first light at the Zabrisky Point lookout. A phalanx of cloud-angels soar unheeded above their heads.

Clouds suggest angels soaring over the Manifold, and aptly named section to the south of Zabrisky Point.

After an astro-bivvy night at Emigrant Campground with the wind still buffeting, we got an early start at 5 AM to be in place for sunrise at Zabrisky Point. My travel companion and I took up stations to watch the show. Manly Beacon rears into the morning sky.

A sweltering 108?, and a breeze like hot, fine-grained sandpaper to your skin greeted us upon arrival at Stovepipe Wells, Death Valley. Not much time to be in place for last light reaching under the clouds, either, so a short trip out to the Devil’s Cornfield was in order.

A fissure in a granite berm provides a narrow home for a lodgepole pine at Cathedral Lake.

A snag casts shadows on the granite berm at Lower Cathedral Lake.