Description — This is a photo of a grove of bristlecone and bottlebrush pine trees on Wheeler Peak in Great Basin National Park, Nevada. It was taken in August 2015, in late afternoon.
Camera Nerd Info — Mamiya 7 II medium format camera, Mamiya 43mm f/4.5 N lens, Fuji Provia 100F film, exposure not recorded.
Commentary — This grove of bristlecone and bottlebrush pine trees is at the end of a mile-long trail at 10,000 feet altitude on Wheeler Peak. Some of the bristlecone pines are 4,000 years old! Wheeler Peak features a “rock glacier”, which is a layer of ice hidden under rubble, which I presume keeps it insulated from Nevada’s heat. The park rangers do not know how thick the glacier is. It feeds the stream that leads off the mountain and provides some water for the valley below.
I declined to drag my heavy Linhof for a mile at high altitude, so I took the medium-format Mamiya instead. The 43mm lens provides a wide field of view for the camera’s 6×7 centimeter frame. As expected, the Provia had a bluish cast due to UV light at this altitude which I had to remove in post-processing.
ML