Monday, February 21, 2005

Today began with rain and ended with rainbows. Dawn brought light rain and gloomy overcast skies, and after a quick tour of the valley I tried driving up Route 120 toward Crane Flat. It heads west and overlooks the lower valley as it gains altitude; in other words, it's a way to look around and see what the weather's doing. Nice views, too.

Up there, I found Class Structure, the monochrome image at the right. The image beside it, Nature's Canvas, was taken later and is a composition of the valley wall near Bridalveil Fall, the treeline and a cliff-cast shadow.

Breaks in the cloud cover began creating solar spotlights across the terrain, so I grabbed a few compositions, then headed back to the valley.

That's when I found the Half Dome image, as the sun hit the cold, wet rock releasing a shroud of mist.

Light happened. For a while, anyway. And then the clouds fused together and began dropping rain again.

I whiled away part of the storm on a misguided adventure that took me up Route 120 past Crane Flat and out into miles-and-miles of miles-and-miles. I pulled over after a while, checked a map and decided it wasn't worth the long drive in heavy rain.

With the valley still soaking under a wet cloudbank, I almost called it a day and headed back to the cabin.

Luckily I decided to stick it out, and the sun returned bearing gifts, one of which was a well-placed beam directly on Bridalveil Fall, at exactly the right angle to create a rainbow-colored band in the mist.

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