Yosemite has been covered innumerable times — by photographers, painters, writers, and wanderers. No one did more to introduce it to the world than Ansel Adams, whose photographs brought this place into living rooms and imaginations long before most people had any chance of standing in the valley themselves. For me, it was Adams who first made Yosemite feel real, even though it was practically in my backyard.
My first visit was over a quarter century ago, as a graduate student on an overnight trip with a school group. We camped, we hiked, and at some point along the trail up toward Vernal Falls — partway up, at the lake that opens up above it — we swam. The water was cold in the way that glacier-fed water is cold: not unpleasant, just clarifying. It felt like the kind of place that imprints itself on you without asking permission. I didn't know then that I'd be returning for decades.
What strikes me, having returned to it across different seasons and different chapters of my life, is that Yosemite doesn't repeat itself. It presents a different face each time — winter's muffled granite and bare oaks, the violent green of spring snowmelt, the heavy gold of late summer afternoon, the quiet withdrawal of fall. Winter in particular transforms the valley entirely: snow stretching from wall to wall across the floor, the two great granite faces rising on either side like open arms extending a welcome, and those rose-pink mornings when the first light catches the snow and the stone and the valley seems to hold its breath. Each visit feels like meeting the same person in a new mood, and finding them just as interesting as before.
There is a quality to being there that I can only describe as meditative. Something in the scale of it — the walls of El Capitan rising without apology, the falls threading down from distances that seem impossible — stills the noise inside you. What's remarkable is that this feeling persists even when the valley floor is clogged with cars, all of them carrying people chasing the same sensation. The place is big enough, and ancient enough, to absorb all of us without losing itself.
The valley announces itself in layers. El Capitan dominates one side with a kind of daunting authority — sheer and enormous and indifferent. The falls appear from seemingly every direction, each with its own character and season. But the most striking feature, the one that stops you every single time no matter how many times you've seen it, is Half Dome. That famous silhouette — the great semi-circle cleaved cleanly as if by design — has been photographed from every conceivable angle, in every conceivable light. I have probably hundreds of photographs of it myself, accumulated over years of visits, and I've attempted to paint it at least three times. Only one of those paintings is complete: Pink Morning in Yosemite, a 24×36 canvas I finished in 2021. This was inspired from a photograph postcard I bought in the Yosemite Village Store and drew it digitally via Procreate and Apple Pencil on my iPad. I then printed it on a canvas and then added a layer of real acrylic paint on top for embellishments. That was my pandemic project and opened a new medium of expression. The other two are still in progress, which perhaps says something about the subject — it resists being finished, because there's always another version of it worth attempting.
That's the nature of the place for an artist. Anywhere you turn, any angle you choose, you find a vista that feels like nature presenting itself at its most considered. The light changes, the season shifts, the crowd thins or thickens, and none of it diminishes the view. It just changes it.
And that, I think, is what keeps pulling me back. Not nostalgia, not habit — though there's some of both. It's the suspicion that I haven't quite seen it yet. That the version of Yosemite I'm looking for is still out there, in some early morning or late afternoon I haven't arrived for yet.