Yosemite from the Air

Flickr upload by Mike Wiacek.This one comes to us by way of our friend Steven Bumgardner. Note the Long Valley Caldera and the White Mountains in the upper right-hand corner. Click the photo to download a big high-res version.

Comments

[YosemiteSteve]

There was a beautiful series of maps that the National Park Service commissioned back around 1970, for a handful of western parks. I can't remember the artist name, something like Brenner. Anyway, they were painted from this same perspective, and the perspective always looked a little off to me. Lo and Behold, this photo looks almost exactly like it. Perhaps that artist scouted from a plane?

[SG]

I feel like I've seen those, but maybe not. I'm a sucker for aerial perspectives. What a shift that must have been, when people first started to get real glimpses of the topography from a bird's eye view, as it were. Wish I had endless amounts of time to just dig down and find some of those first encounters. It'd make a neat book--and/or a cool video... Having spent much of yesterday re-reading a bunch of Desert Solitaire (again) I feel like there's something somewhere in Abbey where he talks about how you're wasting plane fare if you don't sit by the window. I couldn't agree more. Again, thanks for sharing stuff like that. —dp