Vernal Falls, Yosemite National Park —
Vernal Falls, one of Yosemite National Park’s many waterfalls, as seen while perched on a large boulder jutting out into the river below. Vernal Falls lies below the previously pictured Nevada Falls, which flows into a pool called the Emerald Pool which empties over Vernal Falls. Below the falls (and off to the right in this photo) runs the Mist Trail, the principle means for hikers to reach the lookout at the top (right) of the falls. Hikers are typically drenched by the mist from the falls, sometimes as though they were in pouring rain.
Perhaps out of an abundance of caution for my camera equipment, I wimped out and took the longer John Muir Trail route to get above the falls. However, I still managed to get some spectacular views of the falls (again, unfortunately, my photographic abilities were even more severely limited at the time I visited Yosemite in 2007, and the spectacular views are not evident in the photos).
Of interesting note (to me, anyways): the large and apparently dead tree trunk in the right center is also clearly visible in a similar photo I’ve seen in a book by Ansel Adams taken in the 1920s or 1930s. However, in Adams’s photograph, the tree is very clearly still alive.