The Eye of a Stranger

Even with all the years visiting Yosemite and driving 395, this past May was my first visit to the Alabama Hills. I didn't have any specific shooting locations in mind. I just wanted to sample a little beer and BBQ along the way camp out in Lone Pine Campgrounds [great spot], and maybe find some good light. Movie Road in the Alabama Hills is Hollywood's famous on-location filming spot for many classic Westerns. On first visit, I found it . . . underwhelming. But if you drive/hike through often enough, you start to perceive the possibilities. Unfortunately, we had mostly flat light the several days I was there, and almost no clouds except those that gathered over Mt. Whitney in the afternoon, and then dropped out of sight at dusk..

Still, the Mobius Arch is photogenic, something that the selfies and posed shots on social media demonstrate. I was here in the afternoon and evening, but liked this shot of Whitney and the Needles beneath the clouds through the arch in the afternoon.

The Mobius Arch in the Alabama Hills frames Mt. Whitney and the Needles in the bright afternoon sun.
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Möbius Arch — Alabama Hills, Eastern Sierra

The Mobius Arch is a Jurassic sandstone formation at the foot of the Sierra Nevada, older than the mountains it frames. Standing inside it, with Whitney and the Needles filling the opening and the desert floor dropping away beneath, the compression of distance is almost vertiginous — the arch perhaps fifty feet away, the summit fourteen thousand feet distant, both in the same frame. This is the Eastern Sierra's essential image: old stone framing older stone, warm desert rock in front of cold granite, the arid present looking through to the alpine past. Spring clouds have built against the east face of the range — they move in from the Pacific, hit the wall of the Sierra, and pile up against the peaks, casting the specific purple-blue that high cloud throws over granite in the hour before the light changes. The peaks carry patches of snow. We have stood here many times in different seasons and different light. The composition is always waiting, and it is never quite the same twice.