Lenticular cloud above Mounts Dana and Gibbs
Saturday Claudia and I drove up to Tuolumne Meadows. There was still lots of snow in the high country—not as much as when the pass first opened, of course, but plenty. We hiked around Pothole Dome to the place where the Tuolumne River starts to tumble down from the west end of the meadows, as I wanted to photograph these cascades with high water. We had the place to ourselves and it was beautiful. Claudia took a short video of that upper cascade, which I posted on Facebook.
We kept our eyes on a big lenticular cloud that had formed over the mountains to the north, but it seemed to dissipate near the end of the day. As we walked back up to the main meadow near sunset, however, we saw that a smaller lenticular cloud was riding above Mt. Gibbs, so we rushed to a spot closer to the road and caught the last sunset light on the mountains. I assembled the panorama above from two images zoomed in on the peaks.
We didn’t get home until 11 p.m., but it was worth it. We had a great afternoon in a special place.
Water leaving Tuolumne Meadows (this is the cascade in the video)
