First of all, please accept my apologies for neglected my blog for a few months. Since my last post, my daughter got married, I shot like a crazy man during the Summer, added an online class to my curriculum, made another trip to Europe and a quick trip up the Oregon Coast, and I’m just now sitting down to catch my breath during the Christmas break. Finding time to upload content to this blog has become more of a challenge lately, but I’m hoping to do better in 2020.
I had originally planned to get a post up after shooting during back to back to back snow storms in Yosemite last February, so I guess I’m about a year behind. Snow in on the Yosemite Valley floor has been increasingly rare for the past 10 years or so, and more rare still have been longer weekends when I can get away from the college and shoot. So when everything lined up and I saw “heavy snow” in the forecast for Yosemite on a day when I could actually drive up and be there, I was off like a shot. It’s all a bit foggy now, but I must have driven through the night on February 4 and spent the night in the car inside of the park. I headed out before sunrise to start shooting the park and immediately noticed that I had narrowly avoided getting squished as a large Oak tree had fallen and blocked the road from the time that it took to drive back around the loop. I ended up backing up to the El Cap cut off and continued shooting in the lower half of the valley as the heavy, wet snow continued to fall. After shooting for quite some time, it dawned on me that I hadn’t seen ANYONE while I was out shooting. Eventually I came across one other photographer, but there was no traffic on the roads at all. No snow plows….only a couple of maintenance trucks, and a bus that was parked at a weird angle that seemed to be blocking cars from exiting the Yosemite Lodge.
After shooing for an hour and a half or so, a ranger finally appeared in his truck and I asked him where everyone was. He said that the entire park had been shut down due to concern about the heavy snow and the fact that so many trees and branches had come down around the park. He advised that it would be best to leave with an escorted caravan at 2 PM and then was on his way.
Leave? Now? With a gorgeous snow covered park with more snow due to fall? Thinking hard, I decided to head to a spot that was relatively safe from tree fall….the parking lot up at the Chapel. From there I could shoot across the valley, keeping an eye out for heavy, snow laded branches. I knew that trees falling in the park were no joke as people had been killed just a couple of Summers before, so if the rangers were concerned, so was I. I eventually found my spot by the chapel and set off to do more shooting. Eventually the storm lightened up and the roads were re-opened to the public. The thing that was so unnerving about that particular day was not just the fact that all roads leading in and out of the park were closed. I think I saw a total of FIVE other photographers throughout the afternoon who ventured out of the lodge or Ahwanee to shoot. For most of that day, I was completely alone.
And it was amazing.
(The video above was compiled from my iPhone, go pro, and some of the shots I came home with from this storm and the two that came after. I made several attempts to be in the park during a snow storm the year before but didn’t have much luck, so to be able to shoot three storms in a row in Yosemite Valley might just be a once in a lifetime event for me. Even though video isn’t my main thing, I’m beginning to expand into that area and hope to have more video content for my blog and youtube channel in the future.)