Countless millennia of relatively quiet wind, water and chemical erosion reveals an incredible landscape of pleasing tumult at the foot of the sharp, glacier-carved peaks of the Sierra Nevada in southern California.

These jumbled and tumbled features of the Alabama Hills are made of the same stuff, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, as the Sierra Nevada's peaks that tower in cloudless skies just beyond the top of the frame here, but with much different stories since their shared hot origins deep in the earth. The glaciations of the relatively-recent past that shaped the highland alpine reaches didn't much reach or endure in the lowlands this far south in North America.

I've taken a shot very similar to this before on another morning where weather conditions allowed me to focus my attention more solely on the details of the Alabama Hills rather than being drawn always to include the dramatic high peaks beyond, but I wanted to try to catch it again here appreciating the nice orange-pink morning light that visually brought this amazing landscape to life.

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Tags:   Alabama Hills 395 Lone Pine California Nikon Nikkor Landscape Mount Whitney photobenedict Lone Pine Peak Mt. Whitney Sierra Nevada Manzanar Sunrise Rocks Rocky Boulders Crags Clouds Peaks Ridges Hills Slopes Scree Fields Boulder Erosion Eroded Cloudy Wisps Mood High Sierra Dawn Inyo National Forest Eastern Sierra Soft Subtle Light Sierra Crest Morning

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The enthralling, jumbled landscape of the Alabama Hills rises to the foot of the Eastern Sierra's angular prominences, which appear almost as apparitions among tendrils and thin veils of fast moving morning clouds, near Lone Pine, California.

I was very fortunate this Holiday season to be able to take a couple of nice trips to different parts of California, the first a wonderful bit of travel enjoying California's sights, wine and food with my wife, and then later after the New Year catching up again with Josh Krasner for a short photography outing focused on the Eastern Sierra and Death Valley. I've briefly passed through a few areas in the Eastern Sierra in recent years--enough to realize the almost unmatched photographic opportunities available there, but not long enough to well explore where and how to begin photographing this splendorous and varied landscape. As it turned out, a storm and thick, low cloud cover limited us to only one good morning shoot, but it was an interesting one.

That morning, the clouds parted nicely to the southeast before dawn, giving us hope of nice alpenglow on the dramatic and snow-accented eastern faces of the Sierras--and, hopefully, also some beautiful light on the clouds hovering over and wisping between the towering peaks. Things never seem to go as planned in these situations though, and soon these very low and fast moving cloud formations began passing through in front of the peaks, blocking most of the alpenglow and cloud color opportunities, but happily leading to a few moodier and more mysterious layered visages. In this moment, just a little warm light found its way to the tumble of rock forms in the surrounding Alabama Hills before brushing the lower steeps of the Sierras, while the passing clouds rendered the higher or more distant peaks as little more than ethereal shapes, shadows or suggestions in the landscape. It was wonderful.

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Tags:   Alabama Hills 395 Lone Pine California Nikon Landscape Mount Whitney photobenedict Lone Pine Peak Mt. Whitney Sierra Nevada Manzanar Sunrise Rocks Rocky Boulders Crags Clouds Peaks Ridges Cloudy Wisps Mood High Sierra Dawn Inyo National Forest Eastern Sierra Soft Subtle Light Sierra Crest Morning

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Brilliant yellow-orange light seems almost to radiate from the lower leading line of a cloud front pouring over the east edge of the Sierra Nevada--in the Alabama Hills, near Lone Pine, California.

I've never before seen light quite like this in a setting like this. Somehow in some way I can't well put to words there was a feeling in the atmosphere, perhaps something we could call magical realism (if I may borrow a literary term). Even the perception of light angles seemed somehow off.

Several of the northeast mountain slopes shone in golden hues as if lit from the radiating cloud front rather than from the angle of the distant setting sun. A soft breeze gained strength, but not too much, and some sort of midsize animal darted among these jumbled boulders, visible from time to time only as streak of fur in one or another of the small interstitial spaces between the great stones. Colors of winter and some of spring found the sage and grasses, and even the rocks and stones themselves. It was a truly memorable evening in the Eastern Sierra.

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Tags:   Alabama Hills 395 Lone Pine California Nikon Nikkor Landscape Mount Whitney photobenedict Lone Pine Peak Mt. Whitney Sierra Nevada Tuttle Creek Sunset Range of Light Rocks Rocky Boulders Crags Clouds Peaks Ridges Hills Slopes Boulder Cloudy Wisps Magical Orange Yellow Mood High Sierra Evening Inyo National Forest Eastern Sierra Light Sierra Crest

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Faulted, uplifted, fractured, eroded and tumbled down, the Alabama Hills provide quite a compelling landscape accented with warm dawn light at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, near Lone Pine, California.

Josh and I drove over to the Alabama Hills the day before this shot was taken only to find the area fairly socked in with textureless clouds, and with a larger and unfortunately visually uninteresting storm bearing down as the day progressed. We used that time to scout around a fair bit, marveling at the jumbled rocky landscape and imagining how grand the scene could be if the clouds parted in the morning to reveal sunrise light on the great mountains rising behind this interesting foreground.

And during those scouting efforts over the wider area around Lone Pine, I have to admit we almost got our not-nearly-high-enough clearance rental vehicle seriously hung up on a rocky dirt road a good ways higher in the foothills above Manazar that afternoon as the whipping wind signaled the storms' arrival. But that's a story for another day, or perhaps not at all, since it reveals some less than stellar decision making on our part given the obvious limitations of the vehicle we had (wouldn't have been any problem at all with a high-clearance 4WD of course). Funny thing is that, since we didn't end up wrecking the thing, we'll probably end up remembering wrestling with that one stretch of road longer than most anything else from our trip this past winter.

Anyway, nature steered our focus in another direction for a while the next morning at sunrise as an unrelenting series of cloud patches moved in from the north, each advancing and passing very quickly, but still on the whole obscuring the Sierra peaks during most of the best sunrise light. An impediment can just as well be inspiration for a different approach, however, so we shifted much of our attention to using the Alabama Hills as the primary scene element rather than foreground for images highlighting the jagged forms of the Sierra ridges and peaks beyond.

When I took this shot, that torrent of fast moving cloud banks had wholly obscured everything above the top of the frame here, but I thought it was beautiful how vibrant sunrise light darted under the clouds for a few moments here to alight on some of the Alabama Hills' interesting features and the lower slopes and crags of the mountains beyond.

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Tags:   Alabama Hills 395 Lone Pine California Nikon Nikkor Landscape Mount Whitney photobenedict Lone Pine Peak Mt. Whitney Sierra Nevada Manzanar Sunrise Rocks Rocky Boulders Crags Clouds Peaks Ridges Hills Slopes Scree Fields Boulder Erosion Eroded Cloudy Wisps Mood High Sierra Dawn Inyo National Forest Eastern Sierra Soft Subtle Light Sierra Crest Morning

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With soaring mountains and grand vistas all around, sometimes it's a random little nook in the landscape that infatuates, even if only me. It was the dead of winter, the grasses desiccated and yellow, but the sage bushes had begun to renew a bit of their namesake spring hues even as the nearby trees and brush held their reddened autumn leaves. It really did feel like a confusion of seasons--in the Alabama Hills, near Lone Pine, California.

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