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Galen Rowell is an internationally renowned wilderness photographer and author. His writings and photographs appear in Life, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, and Outdoor Photographer. Galen was scaling Sierra peaks by the age of ten, and had made over 100 first ascents by thirty. In 1984 he received the Ansel Adams Award for his contributions to the art of wilderness photography. Galen's latest of 13 books is called Bay Area Wild. PhotoSecrets Yosemite  | After photographing for three decades on all seven continents, Yosemite remains as enticing as ever to photograph, and just as unique as when I first saw it as a child. People have told me about a lot of places that are supposed to look like Yosemite, but none have come close. Sure, I've seen higher cliffs, deeper valleys, and countless big waterfalls in the course of my travels, but, like the words of a poem, it's not the individual elements that are poignant, but the way they come together into a meaningful whole. My mother first arrived in the Valley by open touring car in 1916, during the first year that automobiles were allowed. She fell in love with the park, and in the 1920s performed classical music on summer nights at Camp Curry and the old Glacier Point Hotel. When she introduced me to Yosemite in 1943 at the tender age of three, traffic in the valley wasn't a problem. War time gas rationing was in effect, and no new tires could be purchased. My father saved gas coupons for months, then glued strips of inner tube around his tires to save the treads, taking two full days to make the journey at less than twenty miles per hour. Regardless of the recent floods of people and water, the essential Yosemite is still 100 percent there for me. I experience it when I'm photographing Half Dome from Ahwahnee Meadow at sunset, when I'm hiking up the Yosemite Falls Trail at dawn, or any time I'm away from the roads in the 96 % of the park that is designated Wilderness. The rare times that I've been caught in summer traffic jams in the Valley, I've deserved it. I should have planned to have driven there earlier, or to have been out on a remote trail, or to have ridden around the Valley on my bike with my camera pack. There are any number of options to avoid self-imprisonment by seatbelt inside the same mechanized world of vehicles and crowded roads that most visitors seek to leave behind, but never really escape. One survey found average visits to Yosemite lasted two hours with only minutes spent out of a motor vehicle. Despite the many thousands of photographs I've made in Yosemite over the years, I know I'll never say I've seen it all and put down my camera. I have not "done" Yosemite yet, as tourists who collect park stickers are prone to say, because the landscape means more to me than a visual scene to be passively ingested and recorded in snapshots. The Yosemite experience becomes more powerful with each return visit because it is self-renewing, quite unlike the one-time visual exploitation of our senses that happens when we watch an action movie or even a real-life event, such as the Olympic Games, where it's basically all over once the outcome is known. The more you know about the natural world, the more you want to see. Yosemite has a long history of great interpreters - from John Muir, to Ansel Adams, to the photographers and writers doing the best work today - who have found it necessary to spend long periods of time witnessing the cyclic, but never directly repeated movements of the clouds, the light, the rising mists, and the flowing waters in order to communicate their essential meaning to the public. Thus a guidebook like this should not be shelved after the first flush of familiarity with Yosemite. It needs to be kept handy to savor for new ideas. I'll have my copy of PhotoSecrets beside me on each repeat visit to help me discover ever more moments of serendipity, when the images in my mind and before my eyes can be brought together into inspirational photographs. |