A Photographer's Journal

This book is powered by sweat and joy; steep hills and exhilarating telemark skiing descents into silent stands of snowy trees. The land and its smells and tastes are embedded in the memory of those lucky enough to have immersed themselves in it. My goal is to transport you: to the soft meadows, the smooth, hard granite, and the dancing trees of our remarkable mountains. It is collection of images I made hiking up and down the range. My hope is to give the reader a visual photographic story of these brilliant gems of divides, crests, recesses, and basins. Hopefully the following images remind us of the delicate and powerful nature of our land and ourselves. It is a simple book with four loose sections; from Mineral King in the far southwest, then Northeast to the John Muir Trail. We sail north up the trail through Kings Canyon on the long haul up to Yosemite National Park. Finally we wander around the park in the fall and into winter. The book is not chronological but rather loosely geographical. I have been stumbling around them since 1965 and hope to bring you some of the enjoyment they#xE2;#xAC;"ve brought me. It#xE2;#xAC;"s a wonder that I#xE2;#xAC;"ve never been bear-mauled, or too frozen, too lost or too inept to find my way back home. For seven years I worked as one of the relief rangers at the Ostrander Ski Hut in Yosemite National Park. Along the way I have had the honor to work with some of the best Rangers in the National Park Service. I try to tell a complex story in the simplest of ways. I used many different cameras to tell my stories but this first volume is mostly made with medium format equipment. But no matter what the camera, I have tried to make photos rather then take photos. This is the first of four volumes. The others will be the Himalaya, the Flowers and Paths of Berkeley, Layered Figure Studies, and the Police and Firefighters of the Bay Area. With the delicacy of a deer in a warm meadow to the furious power of a boiling thunder storm this range has displayed the extremes the Sierra will challenge us with. And if these images transport you to these places that#xE2;#xAC;"s the best I can hope for. But if they manage to transform you in the process then the winds of grace have touched us both. So for everybody who has ever stumbled down an rocky pass on a warm, late summer day, or been snowed on in the dead of a sparkling October night you know what I#xE2;#xAC;"m talking about. For those of you who don#xE2;#xAC;"t, maybe the images in this book will send you soaring through them and then you might smell the granite.