Distant Fantasy
Photo Location: Bishop, California
The drive up from Bishop takes about forty minutes — twenty miles and three thousand feet of elevation gain through the Inyo National Forest, the road getting narrower as the aspen stands get denser and the air gets colder. By the time North Lake comes into view, you understand why photographers make this drive every October regardless of what else is happening in their lives.
I pulled over where the road ends and the lake begins, and the scene was exactly what the name suggests — something from a version of the world that is more perfect than the one you usually inhabit. Gold aspens on every hillside, their color reflected in the dark water below, and beyond all of it the granite peaks of the Eastern Sierra rising into a sky that October in California makes impossibly blue. Near and far simultaneously — the warm gold of the aspens up close and the cold white of the mountains in the distance, the two halves of the frame operating in completely different temperatures and completely different scales and somehow resolving into a single image that feels like a landscape from a dream.
I have been to North Lake in summer. It is beautiful. In October it is something else entirely — the kind of place that makes you want to come back every year and photograph it differently each time because it never gives you the same image twice.
TruLife acrylic-mounted limited edition of 100, signed by me with Certificate of Authenticity. Free US shipping.
Image copyright © Jongas Fine Art Photography.
