Yosemite
The last stop of our road trip, before heading back to San Francisco, was Yosemite National Park. I’d been the most excited to visit here, having seen such incredible images from some photography friends who have visited.
Our first evening set the bar high for the next 2 days. Not far from the famous Glacier Point lookout is the equally breathtaking, but far less well known, Taft Point. After 20 minutes of easy hiking from the trailhead, we arrived at the vista just before sunset.
Truthfully, photos cannot do justice to the scale and magnificence of the view here and it’s actually hard to put it into words. It’s so high, so ridiculously big, that your eyes actually struggle to take it all in at first. It almost doesn’t look real, more like a life-size painting of perfection.
I had the best seat in the house as the sun set – the entire valley falling away in front of me, 3000 feet below.
The next morning we were up at 5 to drive back into the valley for sunrise (well, when I say ‘we’ I mean James drove and I slept). We made it just in time to capture the first rays of sunrise creeping down the ‘Dawn Wall’ on El Capitan. We luckily chose a morning without a breath of wind; which made for the crystal clear reflections in the still water (although I did freeze my toes off wading across).
I think this was now our forth 5am start in a row so we spent the rest of the day relaxing by the river before taking some more shots for our Hamilton Campaign in the evening.
