Bishop Creek, Mount Agassiz, and the Palisades

Over Labor Day weekend I climbed Mount Agassiz in the Eastern Sierras from the South Lake trailhead. It's a grueling dayhike but the views from the top are amazing.

Complete pictures can be found here:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jensenl/visuals/album/2006/agassiz/

We also hiked to Thousand Island Lake the next day but I haven't had a chance to review those photos yet.

Nice pictures need to add Mount Agassiz to next years hike.

What's the bottom left pic? Is it a crater lake or just a random lake surrounded by snow or water above the snow, you don't know?

Interresting location. I like the interresting jestream-like cloud formations on your website.

The bottom left picture is just a lake in the middle of a snow bowl that sits at the foot of Mount Agassiz. It's hard to tell the scale because it was thousands of feet away but considering that the rocks that surround it are probably people-sized, I think it is fairly large. Based on a measurement in Google Earth, I would guess it is 150ft long.

You can see it in the Google Maps satellite pictures:
http://www.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=bishop,ca&ie=UTF8&z=17&ll=37.108133,-118.526044&spn=0.004372,0.010064&t=k&om=1&iwloc=A
(note that it is about 300ft long in the above picture, but very narrow)

I'd love to see it up close, for some reason I am fascinated by the vivid blue colors that emanate from snow/ice.

Note that in a normal snow year the snow would probably have all been melted in this area by this point and it would be a normal lake but this area saw record snowfall last year.

Ah from this angle one sees its a glacier corridor and not a crater.
The intense color made me wonder if it was ice below the water or not...

Oh man those high altitide shots of the craggy peaks in the Sierra are sweet.. Too bad you could not stay for the sweet light...

I liked the shots on your site of you and your wife climbing high on the boulders. Definetely not for me, so I'm content living the experience thru your photos.

Nice image of that tarn. I've seen it myself after climbing Agassiz in 1982. Such ice talus tarns are caused by excessive piles of snow often below the lee sides of steep cliffs where winter snows pile up so deeply they push rocks down to form slight craters. The pushing in really large one like the one below Mount Mendel result in rock glaciers which usually have lots of ice below the rock surfaces. ...David

Wow, what views, nice work, shooting and hiking

A truly wonderful collection, Lars. Hiking up there must have been a blast.