This excerpt has been taken from a famous book named ” Yosemite in Time – Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers” by ” Mark Klett, Rebecca Solnit, Byron Wolfe”. “Yosemite – Glaciers and Gods” are still active but slowly retreating as climate change warms their environment. Tree Removal Berkeley CA, would provide you with an insight on Tree clocks. We are thankful to the author as he describes a world-famous destination that has attracted celebrated photographers.
Glaciers and Gods-Yosemite
There were times in this project when Mark would tell me his camera was within inches of Muybridge’s and times when he said that he was a lot more approximate—somewhere within several feet, precise enough by anyone else’s standards. He and Byron saw things that were entirely invisible or unreadable to me, not only the details of rock formations in relation to each other that let them come close to the exact spot where a photograph was taken, but the angle of light that determined what time of year and day Muybridge had been there. Once, standing by the rock in the foreground of his Bridalveil Falls photograph, though with young forest occluding everything else between us and the falls that had been visible in 1872, commented: “Right time of year, but he was here half an hour earlier than us,” and I pictured that artist hastening away before us, just out of reach.
But once spatial distance is eliminated, the span of time can begin to be measured, and temporal distance is often immeasurably vast. Visible in the landscape are changes in trees, rocks, waterways, for no landscape stays the same even for an hour, let alone a century. But the person who stood there in the same spot also stood in a different world. When Muybridge worked in Yosemite, a great road-less unindustrialized expanse stretched away in all directions from a place that being mapped, a place whose indigenous inhabitants were still unobtrusively gathering acorns and living in cedar-bark structures in the valley. Muybridge, with his hobnail boots and remote place indeed, as I realized one day when Byron took a GPS reading of our site, for the California skies in 1872 still belonged to birds, clouds, and the beyond, while ours are cluttered with signals, satellites, airplanes, smog, and anxieties.
Yet looking back at them from the early twenty-first century, the Victorians who came tramping through Yosemite seem closer to us than many of the figures of the mid-twentieth century because the urgent intensity with which they scrutinized the landscape is not so far from our own. For them the crisis of meaning came about with the collapse of an old order, in which humanity was distinct from the rest of the species and the center of a worked presided over by an actively involved God. For at least the environmentally own rise to near-divine status. We have changed the weather, wiped out species, modified the genetic code, paved over vast expanses of landscape. For the Victorians, the past was a destabilized zone that threatened to radically redefine their sense of self and place in the world. The Darwinian revolution frightened people by reducing their scale. Now we are giants. Our doubts are located in a nebulous future whose crises can also be found in Yosemite. It is as though our predecessors were looking down into a tremendous chasm opening at their feet. We look up at a bricked-over sky against which we may smash our heads.
In 1872, Yosemite was compelling for two reasons. One was its great natural beauty, its lofty cliffs, magnificent waterfalls, and soaring sequoia trees, a concentration of scenic grandeur unlike anyplace else in the world. Most of the elements of Yosemite’s beauty were not only vast in size but spoke of vast quantities of time: of the geological ages that had formed its naked expanses of granite, of the millennia the sequoias had been growing. This visible deep time gave Victorians a sense of the sublime vastness of the world and little of the seductive terror the sublime brings with it. The other reason people dent in those rock faces, glacial traces, watercourses, and botanical phenomena. Yosemite was then a sort of outdoor laboratory for investigating all the most pressing theories about time and change.
In 1872, Asa Gray, Joseph Le Conte, Clarence king, John Torrey, and john Tyndall were among the scientists who visited the place, all but King guided by John Muir, who also guided the photographer J.J. Reilly that summer and the painter William Keith that fall. The writer Helen Hunt Jack-son arrived as an ordinary tourist, though she wrote reports for the New York independent newspaper about what she saw; painter Albert Bierstadt traveled with King and the photographers Eadweard Muybridge and Carlton Watkins led their own expeditions there. These were the people who would shape American ideas about nature and landscape, and their crossed paths in 1872 suggest that a sort of wilderness symposium was afoot.
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