Evening Mists - Yellow Mountain

Pre­con­cep­tions often serve to mis­guide us as to what will come of real­i­ty. Hav­ing had a healthy obses­sion with the pho­tographs made by Ansel Adams whilst being a stu­dent and beyond my col­lege years, my very first planned trip to Yosemite had a lot to live up to. As you would expect, it did not dis­ap­point. I will nev­er for­get the moment trav­el­ling along Route 120 as I turned a bend and El Cap­i­tan and Half Dome came into view. All the pages in the books I had read, and the posters I had pinned to my walls, could nev­er have primed me for the charge of emo­tion I expe­ri­enced stand­ing at that road­side. The years of gaz­ing at pho­tographs of this grace­ful val­ley, and now being sub­merged in its real­i­ty, could nev­er be vanquished.

Sev­er­al years lat­er, I was enroute to vis­it Yel­low Moun­tain in east­ern Chi­na. I had seen some images of the tall spire-like moun­tains and not­ed the influ­ence these gran­ite fea­tures had on tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese art­works. I was aware that the land­scape was going to be indeed dra­mat­ic, but lit­tle did I know what to expect when con­front­ed with it for the first time. I was also a lit­tle dis­tract­ed by the many peo­ple I was sur­round­ed with when mak­ing the approach to the cable car wait­ing to take me up into the moun­tains. My pur­suance of land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy ordi­nar­i­ly finds me in qui­et remote places with noth­ing like this to con­tend with or as many peo­ple to nav­i­gate through. As the cable car arrived at the top the doors opened and out I head­ed to the first of many steps I would encounter dur­ing my time on Yel­low Mountain.

As I reached the top, I could see groups of peo­ple stand­ing next to a waist-high rail­ing with mists that slow­ly passed over them as they peered out­wards and below. I walked over to the first view­ing plat­form and grad­u­al­ly pushed my way to the front. Before me was a land­scape almost unfath­omable in both scale and beau­ty. The mists that now sur­round­ed me could be seen soft­ly ris­ing from the val­ley floor and del­i­cate­ly pushed through the trees grow­ing on the blade-like sum­mits of each moun­tain. The sun was set­ting at the end of the day and its light was soft­ened fur­ther by the dif­fu­sion of the mist. Once again, like my expe­ri­ence in Yosemite, the rush of emo­tion was a blend of aston­ish­ment, stu­pe­fac­tion and awe which found me to hav­ing to remind myself to take a photograph.