A massive Giant Sequoia rises up from the slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountains in Sequoia National Park during a break on a stormy day. The massive redwood trunk contrasts with comparatively tiny pines around it. A significant burn scar is testament to the resilience of hundreds or thousands of years of experience this magnificent tree has. Off in the distance another giant can be seen through the other trees
Tags: bark burned california forest giant green national park red redwood scar sequoia sierra sierra nevada sierras tree trees
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Photographing the great redwoods has always proved challenging. They are so massive. And their red-brown bark doesn’t always pop out from the surrounding ground and other trees visually. However, if you coat everything with fresh wet snow that sticks to all the leaves and the ground, suddenly the colorful towering trunks jump right out of the landscape everywhere. And wow do they pop. Here a couple of relatively young giants are flanked by a group of lodgepole pines coated with green lichen.
Tags: blue california evergreen forest fresh giant lodgepole massive national nevada park pine red redwood sequoia sierra sky snow tree winter
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An orange glowing view of Big Baldy's large granite dome as viewed from the summit of Little Baldy. These bald summits seem to be a few of the first big outcrops of the solid mass of Eastern Sierra granite to break through the forest canopy on the range's western slopes. Here a super hazy sunset gives depth as edges of granite poke through the haze.
Tags: baldy big big baldy california kings canyon little baldy mountains national national park orange park red sequoia sequoia national park silhouette sun
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The largest single living tree by volume on the entire planet sticks out effortlessly amid heavy snowfall in Sequoia National Park on a spectacular winter day. Like my trip a few weeks earlier to Yosemite National Park, the stars aligned for me to experience the transformation of this park in the snow. The General Sherman tree truly is superlative. In this 70mm view from a ways away, the photographic challenge of capturing it is clear. However the lack of slope and branches in the lower half of the tree make it seem like a skyscraper. It stands as a giant red monolith in the forest, with the tops or discernible slope in its shape only visible by tilting one’s head way up. The old giants really do stick out and are accented dramatically by covering the reddish brown dirt with white. The snowfall muffled the sound to dead silence, with only the occasional bit of wind interrupting.
Tags: general sherman heavy national park red redwood sequoia sequoianp snow snowfall storm tree winter
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The morning after an overnight storm brought fresh snowfall, the largest living single stem tree by volume on Earth basks in the fresh sunshine. The General Sherman tree in the heart of the Giant Forest in Sequoia National Park is not the tallest, widest, or oldest, but at over 52,000 cubic feet it is superlative. At 274.9 feet tall and 36.5 feet in diameter at the base, a nearby information sign says that 6 foot tall human standing where I was looking up at this tree is proportional to a mouse next to a 6 foot tall human. It is forever humbling to stand next to such a tree, which has outlived billions of people in its more than two millennia. For this view I tried to capture the feeling of that proportional mouse by pointing my widest non-fisheye lens up at its base. The 11mm field of view I think encompassed the daunting canopy well as the massive sequoia seems almost to lean over and peer back down at me. Like my trip two weeks prior to Yosemite, it has been a goal of many years to visit Sequoia National Park in the winter, and I finally was treated to a true winter wonderland there.
Tags: biggest blue california evergreen forest fresh general giant largest massive national nevada park red redwood sequoia sherman sierra sky snow tree winter
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