El Capitan Meadow near Northside Drive, Yosemite Valley, Yosemite National Park, CA, 10/29/2008
For the second morning in a row I decided to capture the look of El Capitan Meadow beneath its towering namesake just as the meadow became bathed in morning sunlight. This time I focused on graceful russet oaks at the meadow's edge further east than the previous day. Freshly arrived sunshine on grass and trees has a delicate quality that is short lived and completely lacking in harsh mid-morning light. Autumn in Yosemite is a beautiful time, and although the colors are more subtle than in the American northeast, I enjoy the shades of yellow, gold, and russet that can be found here. El Capitan is the largest exposed granite face in the world and rises 3,600 feet above the valley floor. The formation is composed almost entirely of a pale coarse-grained granite (El Capitan Granite) emplaced about 100 million years ago. In addition to El Capitan, this granite forms most of the rock features of the western portions of Yosemite Valley. A separate intrusion of igneous rock, the Taft Granite, forms the uppermost portions of the cliff face.
