In British Columbia we are fortunate to have all four real seasons. Autumn beauty is all around us every year in all its different spenders.
We chase the fresh summer green leaves into yellows oranges and reds. One of the local favourites to chase are teh Golden Larch.
Pseudolarix is a genus of coniferous trees in the pine family Pinaceae containing three species. Pseudolarix species are commonly known as the golden larch, but are not true larches. Often mistaken for their Eastern relative, Tamarack
pseu·do /ˈso͞odō/ DEROGATORY
adjective
not genuine; spurious or sham.
Larix laricina, commonly known as the tamarack, hackmatack, eastern larch, black larch, red larch, or American larch, is a species of larch native to Canada, from eastern Yukon and Inuvik, Northwest Territories east to Newfoundland, and also south into the upper northeastern United States.
In southern British Columbia, larch can grow in pure stands but often it grows in mixed-species stands. Old-growth larch stands are rare. It is present in early, mid-, and late stages of fire-driven, secondary succession. Throughout southern B.C.
Essentially pine trees; that don’t stay green all year like a typical “evergreen”. Needles become a golden yellow colour as they die and fall to the ground for the winter. Transforming our typically year-round evergreen mountainous landscape into a brilliant display of Autumn colours. Alpine Larches (Larix Lyallii) grow in high, dry, rocky terrain, which is why they’re only found quite aways from the mostly sea level and wet Lower Mainland. Manning park, Keremeos, etc, are great places to find them.
It always amazes me how these trees only seem to grow in a very narrow elevation band. It may vary from location to location, but the band seems to be very small regardless. A few hundred meters or less of spread. A golden ring.
Capturing the beauty
Getting this shot involved half a day of driving, 24 km of hiking. Off trail excursion. Mid day camp set up to escape the strongest winds I’ve ever felt, coupled with snow. A short interaction with some mountain goats (who disappeared without a trace in pure magic) Did I mention the 60lb backpack or the frozen camelpack? It was the first time I had to cook in my tent. And thr first time i had to chip ice to make water. Thankful for a small pocket glacier.
Such a wicked beautiful landscape. And running the Fuji GFX100 there was a photographers dream.
Mountain Goat Vista - October 2020 No grand sunset here, but beautiful none the less. Day 2 of our hike, about 28km in. And intentionally well off trail. What's special about this image? It was not one capture, but around 180 individual 104megapixel handheld images; aligned together to create this wide pano of the area. Assembled, de-warped, and cropped this comes to 1639megapixels, or 54078x30315 pixels, printable (if you could find a printer to handle it) to around 180" x101" without any quality loss. More geek: The initial assembled file is 41gb, the version I edit is only 30gb. Saved as a .psb I can't edit this with Lightroom because of its size. A bunch of the work had to be done with photoshop, which I don't regularly try to use, and then I had to reduce the image size to 505MP, which this image is downsized from again for web/socials. I also can't save it to standard file types either, .TIFF seems to have a 4gb limit. It has been a great exercise in workflow, and patience! I hope one day to see this on a large wall. We have it cropped into two-square prints, in our bedroom. Mountain Goat Lakes, Cathedral Provincial Park, Keremeos, BC, Canada GFX100 GF110mm - 1/60 f/16 iso500 Excerpts quoted from Wikipedia and hikesnearvancouver