Leviathans

This is a timeless place where the trees are older than all of us and anyone we knew before us. Where the mists transcend the trees when it layers upon itself over and over consuming the Valley, billowing over the human sense of scale. And where the immeasurable mountains dwarf the mist, wrestle with gravity and reach for the heavens.

Titled Leviathans, this is the second in our series of impressions of Yosemite's Three Brothers from the Tahiti Beach prospect [And no, the three mountains are not called "Three Sisters," as they are so routinely misidentified on social media.]

Paisaje de mañana brumosa con picos de granito nevados que se elevan sobre un bosque de pinos reflejado en un río tranquilo.
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Paisaje de mañana brumosa con picos de granito nevados que se elevan sobre un bosque de pinos reflejado en un río tranquilo.

Greg titled these sequoias "Leviathans" — the biblical sea monster, the thing beyond ordinary scale — and the name is accurate in a way that "giant" is not, because "giant" still implies a category of things that exist at human scale, only larger. The oldest trees in this grove predate recorded European history; they were already old when Rome fell. Made on medium format, this composition refuses the temptation to prettify — these are organisms of such scale that the image's primary task is simply to document the fact of them without diminishing it. The "Recovered" tag in the filename indicates a file-recovery step in post-processing; the final image is clean and contains no artifacts from the recovery.

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