Red Arctic Willow & Virginia Peak

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Yosemite National Park, Tuolumne County
early morning Sunday August 31, 2002, slide 02T1-1
Pentax 67 AEII, 55-100mm zoom, Benbo Trekker
Drum scanned Fuji Provia 100F 220 film to 200mb RGB file
Adobe Photoshop 6.0 processed for accurate image fidelity
Lightjet5000 printed @304.8ppi on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
signature mid bottom left

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In 1977 on a trip up Green Creek, I had day hiked up past Summit Lake over the Yosemite border, where I got a distant view of one of the most unusual peaks I'd ever seen, Virginia Peak. 25 years later I found myself returning to the Green Creek area on a Labor Day group trip and made certain plans to try and get a photograph of the peak with my big camera. The first day four of us backpacked from the Green Creek dirt road end into the Hoover Wilderness reaching the upper Hoover Lake. Actually there were five of us including my brother Joe's buddy, Max the Wonderdog. The next morning my plan was to return to Summit Lake then traverse cross-country across the west slopes of Camiaca Peak to the upper Return Creek headwaters, where I hoped to find an interesting foreground to frame with Virginia Peak.

Thus early next morning a photographer friend, his gal friend, and I set out. The long route traversing across the slopes of metavolcanic Camiaca Peak proved to be tedious with a number of soggy vegetative stream seeps and dry sagebrush slopes deep with tall drying mule ears. Before sun blocked by Camiaca rose enough to illuminate the upper basin, we reached Return Creek and explored upstream. At this frosty meadow at 9,700 feet, we discovered one of the best dense lawns of arctic willow turned a fire red I've seen anywhere. Not only that, but it was far enough back from the peak in order to share a considerable foreground in a wide-angle lens frame.

Arctic willow, salix arctica, a plant common to alpine environments across North America, grows just a few inches high intermixed within the turfy matrix of alpine grasses.

In the Sierra Nevada one finds it at elevations between 8.5k and 12k in well drained gravely flats where water lies a shallow distance below. Note in this image how the foreground willow is a bit higher than the small stream behind that is surrounded only by green grasses. The willow has a tendency to densely dominate the small patches where it has become established. In late August the small leaves begin to undergo color changes that at peak becomes a striking vibrant red when backlit by sunlight. Unfortunately for a photographer, trying to time when a given patch is red, is difficult as the peak red lasts just a few days before the leaves begin to dry eventually to a dull drab brown.

The light colored rock on the left side of the frame is common granite. At the top of 12,001 foot Virginia Peak is wavy chocolate colored strata of Mesozoic Era metasedimentary rocks. Further to the right is Jurassic-Triassic Period metavolcanic geology. Note how talus fans spread out below steep faces have the same rock colors as the faces above them. In the middle ground at left is a broad seep slope of green colored yellow willow draining from unseen Return Lake higher up. At frame center above the still green grassy meadow note yellow areas which are simply grassy areas that have long since dried out. The reddish tints in some spots are more arctic willow. Scattered about are lodgepole pine, pinus murryana. Green patches on the slopes of Virginia Peak are stunted whitebark pine, pinus albicaulis. Any branches sticking out above the mean snow level are subject to avalanches and strong storm winds.

Crop at 100% print size:

   David Senesac
   email: sales@davidsenesac.com

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