Galen Rowell's Sierra Nevada

Book excerpt: The twentieth century’s most celebrated adventure photographer, Galen Rowell, spent much of his life roaming the world with his camera, chronicling exotic locales on all seven continents. Yet he always returned to the land where he started out, both as an adventurer and a photographer: California’s Sierra Nevada. Indeed, in the two years before his death in a 2002 plane crash, Rowell became increasingly focused on photographing the "Range of Light,” producing some of the strongest images of his career. Now the best of his lifetime’s work in his "favorite place on earth” is gathered in this magnificent book, reproduced to the highest standards from digital masters of his 35mm frames. From the lofty cliffs and lush alpine meadows of Yosemite to the stark high desert of the Owens Valley, from the jagged High Sierra crest to the soft contours of the Eastside’s Buttermilk Hills, Rowell captured the Sierra Nevada in his signature "dynamic landscapes,” which combined an artist’s vision, an adventurer’s total access, and a peerless knowledge of optical phenomena in high and wild places. An introduction by Robert Roper traces Rowell's deep roots in the Sierra--a mountain realm he saw in ways no one else has, before or since.