Dark Storm Orange Sunrise on Mount Lamarck

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John Muir Wilderness, Inyo National Forest, Inyo County
sunrise Friday August 6, 1999, slide 99B_15-5
Olympus OM-4T, 80-200mm, Benbo Trekker
Drum scanned 35mm Kodachrome 64 to 100mb RGB file
Adobe Photoshop 6.0 processed for accurate image fidelity
Lightjet5000 printed on Fuji Crystal Archive paper
signature bottom center

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This image captures the most incredible alpenglow conditions I have experienced in the High Sierra during three decades of backpacking. The image is from about elevation 11,000 feet just above the east shore of Upper Lamarck Lake towards the 13,400+ foot headwall north of Mount Lamarck proper. Quite an unusual 7 day backpacking trip in many ways. My brother Joe had symptoms of high altitude sickness a couple days earlier on our second day out when we reached high Lamarck Col at 12,900 feet. So we decided to forgo our plans to descend over the west side to Darwin Canyon and instead camped just below the col. On day three we dropped back down to Upper Lamarck Lake for a couple days easy camping. During night four, winds picked up, some clouds occluded most stars, and temperatures really dropped.

Dawn Friday was so windy and cold with much blocking clouds to the east, that I decided to not make a planned early morning excursion and instead be lazy in my warm sleeping bag and tent. Well just before sunrise, some orange light began illuminating the bottom of clouds to the east. After some wavering, I decided to grab my photo day pack and climb out to where I might get a better look at what was occurring. Thus I climbed up onto a big boulder near our camp. Although clouds covered much of the sky directly above, there was a clear hole of sky to the east where the sun was about to rise. To the west things appeared truly bizarre. Behind the crest, the sky appeared an eerie black. Some kind of unusual storm? Thinking I might see a rare cloud under lit sunrise, I set up the Benbo and OM-4T with my 200mm telephoto lens. Then shivered several minutes waiting for the Sun to rise over the White Mountains far to the east. As the sun came closer to rising, clouds closer and closer towards my position overhead illuminated with bright orange.

When sunlight finally hit the high wall of white granite on the crest, with the amazingly dark black sky behind, the effect was absolutely electric. I let out a rousing roar of excited approval. Kodachrome 64 unlike many of today's pseudo souped up high saturation films, it is renowned for its color fidelity when exposed correctly which is captured in this transparency perfectly. Later after returning home I investigated NWS satellite archives to find that an unusual winter like cold air mass had come down across Alaska, over the eastern Pacific, and passed over the Sierra Nevada as a monolithic towering front. Apparently the cold clear air in front was also quite dry which accounted for the exceptional air clarity necessary for exceptional deep orange sunrise colors. The other enhancing condition was under lit color intensification as low angle orange-red sunlight wavelengths reflected off the bases of overhead clouds towards the west. I might speculate the reason the front behind the Sierra Crest did not illuminate from the sunrise light had something to do with the position of clouds to the east shadowing this section thus leaving it incredibly dark like one sometimes sees with approaching towering thunderclouds.

After taking a few shots, I rousted my sleepy brother, then we quickly broke camp in order to reach and make camp at the nearby Wonder Lakes before weather hit. An hour later as we surveyed camp possibilities in this nearby canyon, a blustery snowstorm began. We barely got tented before the worst hit. The storm petered out over a couple hours leaving a couple inches of snow on grassy areas while melting on the considerable rocky areas rather quickly. A cold clear blue sky followed near sunset. If one backpacks enough in the higher Sierra, one will every few years be hit with snow storms during any month of summer.

Crop at 100% print size:

   David Senesac
   email: sales@davidsenesac.com

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