Submerged Boulders, Precipice Lake. Sequoia National Park, California. August 6, 2008. © Copyright G Dan Mitchell - all rights reserved. This photograph is not in the public domain. It may not be used on websites, blogs, or in any other media without explicit advance permission from G Dan Mitchell. Sunlight illuminates submerged boulders near the cliff face at Precipice Lake on the High Sierra Trail - Sequioa National Park. After shooting the "classic view" of this lake along the shoreline where the High Sierra Trail arrives near the outlet stream, I packed up and headed on up the trail toward Kaweah Gap. A moment later as the trail climbed above the lake I glanced back and saw that the sun was breaking through the clouds and intermittently illuminating the underwater talus at the end of the lake - so I dropped the pack, set up my equipment, and waited for the light. ("Waiting for the light" - perhaps that should be my motto!) Since so many have commented/faved this photograph, I'll add a bit more background info. Some of you may know this lake as the location of a famous early Ansel Adams photograph - here is one link. The lake is high above Upper Hamilton Lake in Sequoia National Park along the HIgh Sierra Trail as it approaches Kaweah Gap, a 10,500'+ pass over the Great Western Divide. After a long, steep climb from Hamilton Lake, you top a small saddle and find the lake - and the famous Adams view - directly in front of you. The vantage point for this photograph is from a few switchbacks above the lake as the trail heads on up toward the Gap. The Sierra is full of deep glacier-formed lakes like this one, and others include steep shoreline cliffs and talus fields that fall directly into the deep waters - but few that I've seen (in four decades of Sierra backpacking) combine these features in quite the way they are seen at Precipice Lake - special versions of each, and packed together in such a constrained space. I know the colors of the submerged rocks and the water are almost unbelievable, but that is really what I saw on this morning. Clouds and the cliffs were shading the area to the upper right, and I saw sun occasionally breaking through as the clouds moved and illuminating, almost as if with a spotlight, the intensely colored water and submerged rocks. (A big "thank you" to Charles Cramer (a.k.a. "Charlie") for some very important ideas about how to post-process this photograph for print.) As Adams said, more or less, “Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.”