“How different my style of participatory photography is compared to that of an observer with a camera who is not part of the event being photographed. It is the difference between a landscape viewed as scenery from a highway turnout and a portrait of the Earth as a living, breathing being that will never look the same twice.”
Galen Rowell, the world’s foremost outdoor photographer and mountaineer wrote those words shortly before he and his wife Barbara died in a plane crash just outside Bishop, California in 2002. In the spring of 2003 I set out on a pilgrimage to find out why Rowell, a world traveler and adventurer who could base his operations anywhere in the world, had chosen the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. No sooner had I arrived on Highway 395, that twisting, turning two-lane blacktop that snakes south from Lake Tahoe down to the high desert of the Owens Valley - framed on both sides by magnificent 14,000-foot peaks - when I discovered the obvious. It’s the light, the utterly magical crystal-clear mountain light that Rowell claimed exists no other place on the planet.
The western Sierras such as Yosemite and Sequoia lure hundreds of thousands of tourists every year from around the world. The peaks and valleys became the base for the work of Ansel Adams, considered as the greatest outdoor photographer in American history, but fewer travelers venture over the high mountains to the other side. Passes are closed by snow for six months of the year, there are no airports capable of handling large planes, luxury resorts are few and far between, and it’s a long drive from the nearest cities of San Francisco or Los Angeles. Bishop, home to Rowell’s famed Mountain Light Gallery, in the southern Owens Valley, may be the most isolated town in California. You need a good reason to make a nine-hour drive to it. A pilgrimage to the home of the world’s greatest mountain photographer gave me the inspiration.
We started our journey at the northern end of scenic 395, high up on a dry plateau in Carson City, Nevada. Although the name gave it a rough and ready cowboy image, Carson City clearly had seen better times. We gave the fading casinos a cursory look and got right outta town.
Just south of Carson City, the tiny rustic town of Genoa was a photographer’s delight. Founded in 1849, it still boasts a still-operating courthouse, restored Mormon Stockade, the state’s “oldest continuously operating thirst parlor in the State of Nevada,” and many historic buildings from the Gold Rush era. Down the road a mile or so at Walley’s Hot Spring Resort natural outdoor pools ranging up to 160 degrees sent hot puffs of steam wafting through the air. The entire eastern Sierra foothills are volcanic, dotted with rustic and undeveloped hot springs.
We puttered down 395 to Bridgeport, a lovely little village just north of the Highway 120 turnoff to Yosemite. Although most people come to the postcard pretty town for fishing just two miles south of town you’ll find Travertine Hot Springs, a series of natural springs emanating out of a strange mineral formation. The tiny pools are a delight in which to relax, percolating at a perfect 90 to 110 degrees. The view westward from the pools is to die for, with 12,000-foot peaks of the Sierras gleaming in the bright mountain air. On a cool and quiet spring day we had the hot pools entirely to ourselves.
Just south of Bridgeport a sign points eastward to the gold rush ghost town of Bodie, founded in 1859 and now in a state of “arrested decay.” Hundreds of ancient shacks, saloons and hotels still stagger upright despite a century of blast furnace summer heat and deadly winter freezes. Designated an historic state park in 1962, the empty hills still ring with the ancient echo of stagecoach robberies, holdups and street gunfights that made Bodie the “wickedest town in the west.”
As you pass Mono Lake, June Lakes and Mammoth Lakes a half dozen small, natural hot springs can be found hidden in the hills off 395 but we headed directly to Long Valley, the epicenter of volcanic activity in the eastern Sierras. You’ll find more outdoor natural hot springs here than any place in the western United States, many channeled, diverted or improved into small outdoor soaking pools. All are free to the public.
Just south of Mammoth’s modest airport we turned east and followed Hot Creek Road to Hatchery Creek. Along this road you’ll find Hot Creek Springs, Shepherd Hot Springs, the Crab Cooker, Hilltop, and Whitmore Pool, tiny hot springs scattered casually around the landscape. The views extend forever, the Sierras looming to the west and the White Mountains to the south and east.
Hot Creek Springs itself is actually a freezing mountain creek, except where boiling water emanating from the magma far below suddenly extrudes into the waters of the creek. The result is a weird mix of freezing water and boiling steam where temperatures are in constant flux, a highly dangerous concoction. Signs at the change houses at the top of the parking lot clearly warn that over a dozen waders have been boiled alive. We hurried on.
South of Mammoth Lakes Highway 395 takes a sudden steep dip downward into the Owens Valley. The air suddenly gets hotter, the landscape changes to a high desert and a magnificent vista widens out in front of you. The town of Bishop sits in the middle of the valley like a shimmering oasis of green, a shining jewel in the midst of towering peaks, with 14,086-foot Mt. Whitney looming in the distance. While many places claim the title of “prettiest town in America,” Bishop gets my vote. A river winding through it, untouched 1950’s style shops, bucolic town park with ducks swimming in a pond, Bishop is a perfectly-preserved piece of Norman Rockwell Americana. Old-fashioned motels, cafes and restaurants line its picturesque main street.
Seven miles south of town, rustic Keough Hot Springs Resort is being restored to its former glory by the Browns, a well-known Bishop family. We dipped our toes in the large, steaming pool and found just the right temperature for tots and parents to swim. Just down the road, Keough Hot Ditch is a series of outdoor soaking ponds that share the same hot creek source.
The next morning we explored Bishop itself and drove around the surrounding hills, picnicking by a quiet stream and finally, despite the unending list of attractions to explore, headed straight for our journey’s destination. Mountain Light Gallery, where Rowell and wife Barbara had found paradise at the end of the road, resides – suitably - in a majestic historic granite building right at the heart of town. Manager Justin Black confirmed that the gallery was slowly becoming a destination for photographers, mountaineers and global travelers from around the world.
The life work of Galen and Barbara Rowell displayed on the walls does indeed give the Gallery the feeling of a shrine to world wanderers. The reach of Rowell’s portfolio is breathtaking; a lifetime of wandering the high mountains of the world in Nepal, Tibet and Patagonia; wild places in Africa, Asia and the arctic zones; mountain climbing in the world’s wildest regions; his travels have produced a stunning body of work.
Rowell’s portfolio pays homage to his mentor Ansel Adams. Adams work differed from the great landscape photographers before him in that he saw the world as a living thing, constantly on the move, to be momentarily captured but never catalogued. The landscape was not just a place; it was a magical series of events never to be repeated. Seeing the world as a breathing body required heightened awareness, strict attention to rhythm and structure. Adams beautifully framed wilderness scenes weren’t just photos, they were metaphors for freedom.
Rowell’s best work goes one step further. Rowell also saw the world as a living, breathing creature, constantly moving and changing directions like a bird on the wing. In the snap of his shutter Rowell could somehow summon up an image of God, just through the manipulation of color and shape. He seemed to view the world not as a static thing to be observed but as a giant outdoor cathedral, as a religious experience in which man should worship. But where Adams went so far as to stretch his canvas through expert use of the tools of his time, using shadows, sharp edges and rough lines to create an entirely new dimension, Rowell went further. There was no distance from his subject, no objectivity, no separation of church and state. Rowell inserted himself directly into his work, both figuratively and literally.
One of Rowell’s most famous photos is that of a rainbow over the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet. The story goes that Rowell sensed that a rainbow was about to occur, sprinted a mile to place himself “at the end of the rainbow,” shooting the fleeting image as if to make it seem that heaven itself, the fabled ShangiLa, had just touched down temporarily here on earth.
Rowell’s famous “self-portrait” shows himself hanging from a giant sheet of cracked mountain rock life an ant on the surface of the moon, with a camera at arm’s-length pointed at himself as if he were taking his own image. In other landscapes displayed on the walls of the gallery, he portrays the earth and sky somehow as wild creatures, deliberately manipulating color and shape to make them come together in a wild, almost sexual, embrace.
Rowell’s critics are legion; photographers, they say, are supposed to be like journalists, dispassionate recorders of reality, not architects building a temple or making themselves part of the story. But Rowell wasn’t just a photographer, he was an artist for the ages who saw the entire world as his stage, and his beloved mountain light merely a pathway lighting the way to God.
“After exploring all seven continents and reaching both poles, it became ever more clear to me that the Eastern Sierra is my favorite place on Earth. No other place has such a readily accessible diversity of well-preserved wildness and natural beauty. The diversity of light and landforms amidst a favorable climate is simply unbeatable.