gets no better for mountain photography?

[h2oman]

My sister just sent me this link:

http://foothillsartcenter.org/fac/po.../main-gallery/

She's not a photographer (or a mountaineer), but she said it was "really spectacular." Sounds plenty worthwhile for anyone who is in the area this summer.

[John Kasaian]

Wow! Washburn and Sella? Time to tank up the VW and take a road trip!

[Drew Wiley]

Gosh that damn heat. My truck AC is working only 50%. I'm salivating over exploring the Trinity Alps one of these days, but suspect it would have to be in Oct
to avoid trailhead heat. Those hills top out right around what I consider my minimum starting elevation. Not the Sierras in that respect. I'm worried enough about getting out of Dodge way down there at Cedar Grove in Sept. Might have to hike at night to get up to a comfortable daytime elevation. I don't think it every got above the 50's at my place here until today, a sizzling barely 60. Have my office heater on almost every day. I was flipping through a Sella book just a week ago. Some of those glaciers in the Alps have sure taken a hit. Then I was checking out a recent picture of Dragontail Pk up in the Enchantments, where I damn near slipped off the end of two-mile long glacier over the bergschrund less than twenty years ago. No glacier even exists there now. This global warming hoax is sure getting out of hand. Wonder who is sneaking around and scooping up all that ice, and where they've hidden it, just to fool us all.

[John Kasaian]

I haven't been to Cedar Grove this year, even with my newly minted Geezer Pass! Things just conspire to keep me in Fresno. My bride wants to visit Santa Cruz to get some relief from the heat (it's been triple digit here in Fresno) but we're @#$%&&%$#@! stuck between prior commitments and paying obscene medical bills. I did get to drive my son up to Boy Scout Camp Chawanakee last Sunday (through a big fire on the other side of Prather) but once up to what's left of Shaver Lake, it cooled off (still smelled like a fire.) Darned near pleasant up there, for about 45 minutes until I had to start back down. Rant over.

[Drew Wiley]

I'm stuck thru July trying to hold the fort down while my wife is under intense training in a new field. In fact, she has to commute clear to Yuba City tomorrow for ten hours of training plus that five hours of driving. Ouch! But here permanent position is right across the Bridge in Marin. After this hurdle, I hope to spend a week in the Rubies in Nevada in Aug, then out of Cedar Grove uphill in Sept, after things cool down a bit, with Plan B and Plan C options, of course, just in case of forest fires. I took a look at my old place in the hills from Google Earth the other day. Pond is damn near empty and everything is brown, even the gardens. First time it's been like that in over half a century. And I had two of the best wells around.

[Greg Y]

Absolutely my two favorites. They don't let the Sella photographs out of Italy very often. Both were exhibited at the Whyte Museum in Banff, during the mountain film festival years ago. I had the pleasure of having dinner with Bradford & Barbara Washburn. Stellar people, both. Barbara was the first woman to summit Denali.

[Drew Wiley]

Sella getting chased up the Baltoro by Gurkha soldiers determined to kill him, and still getting ULF shots halfway up the icefall of Chogolisa over 20,000 ft, and
Washburn handling a massive aerial camera like it was his I-phone ... go figure, next time someone whines about the weight of their Leica rangefinder. Sella was the first person to traverse the Matterhorn, and my favorite portrait of him was taken in his 70's, where he is sitting on a rock at the base of the Matterhorn scowling mad because someone in the climbing party messed up their leg and prevented him from going to the summit that day. But he did have a little proto-Fauxtoshop in him too. For a sense of scale he once darkroom-dubbed in a line of climbers onto a classic Baltoro glacier shot. Nobody spotted the trick until recently stumbling onto the two separate original negatives. The climbers were actually photographed in the Alps, and if they had been true to scale in the
Karakorum shot, would have each been about sixteen feet tall. Even Uelsman would have envied that darkroom trick.