Mt Whitney Zone Forums General Discussion Half Dome From Turlock-The Final Chapter

If it's good enough for the US Government:



(the famous controversial Half Dome from Denair:

Wow, Mike! Where is that "Shrinking Reservoir" sign?

I sure hope Tony Immoos got credit!

Edit: Mike has some good links here on YosemiteNews.info: Half Dome From Turlock: The Final Chapter

Edit: Here's some more information, including a note from Tony. Click on Tony's link to see two images with some of the text from the sign.


By the way, last Friday (Oct 29, 2010), the air was crystal clear in the San Joaquin Valley, and I was thinking it would be nice to go see that view again.

I think it is time to re-post the original to this forum.

The following was posted on wpsmb March 18, 2009. It created quite a stir at the time.

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About a month ago, photographer Tony Immoos from Sacramento got wind of views into Yosemite from the Central Valley floor, and went looking to get a picture.  Below is his picture.

The picture got me pretty excited because I have driven by the grain elevator dozens of times (on Montpelier Road), and because I grew up a few miles from there.

Click on the image for full size (1.5 MB).

Tony's image and write-up is here:  On The Outside Looking In.

Tony also posted a four-photo composite panorama taken from the same place (Click on the image for full size 1.3 MB).

Tony's image and write-up is here:  Yosemite NP and Half Dome from Denair, CA.

So, with all my excitement, I emailed Wayne from this board, and with his help, created an annotated version of the panorama.  I posted it on SummitPost, and people pointed out some mistakes.  Then Mike C from Las Vegas posted his program-generated view.  At first, I did not appreciate the significance, but I emailed him asking about his "program".  It turns out he has spent hundreds of hours creating the program to process USGS data and create the most incredible simulated views.  Not only that, but he can then use his view to pinpoint the geographic location of each peak in the display.

Here is his computer-generated view of the first picture:


And here is the result of all the help I got from both Wayne and Mike: (Click for full-size, 320 KB).


By the way, if you are driving on the 99, that view lines up in Turlock just south of the Monte Vista Avenue (Stanislaus State University) exit.  But there are very few days when it is clear enough to see that far.

Edit 4/4/09:  Yesterday I had the opportunity to stop by the camera site, to see what I could see. While it was nearly clear enough, there were clouds in the Yosemite area so I didn't see the famous view. But I was impressed with this: That picture is phenomenal! I held out my arm as far as possible, and using my thumb, tried to measure the width of the view. Note the first picture above. I could see the grain elevator and the roof of that big shed to its right. They look tiny -- the ARE a mile and a half away. And my thumb HID THE ENTIRE WIDTH OF THAT PICTURE!!! -- from grain elevator to entire width of the shed's roof.

If I could have seen Half Dome, it would have been visible through the eye of a safety pin at arm's length!

Update April 2010: Mike Condron visited the camera site and got a video of the same scene.

The pictures really grabbed my interest, so I created some maps in Google with lines to the peaks in the pictures above.

Originally posted 3-18-09:

Link to an artist view of the Yosemite area:  http://www.freebase.com/api/trans/raw/wikipedia/images/commons_id/2611816

Also, it is pretty tough to refute the computer-generated image. It was generated by giving the location coordinates of the camera and then running the program using USGS elevation/location data. Compare the generated image with the one at the top.

Also, I forgot to post the Google Map view that I used to help me ID the peaks. Here are several views (click on each one for the full size), or click this link to actually go into Google Maps and play with the map yourself.




You can view my smugmug gallery here.

More links--

• Write up from Elias Funez, photographer for The Patterson Irrigator. He describes seeing Half Dome while driving, and stopping and taking his photos:  Aperture Priority, Clearing up the air.
• From the Yosemite Blog:  Is that Half Dome?
• From The Big YZ on Flickr:lookout vistas ISO Half Dome Adventure
• From Self-guiding Auto Tour of Yosemite National Park (1956) by Richard P. Ditton and Donald E. McHenry:
    "V-19 HALF DOME...On clear days it can be seen from places along Highway 99 in the San Joaquin Valley."
• From Mike M on Flickr: Yosemite Valley from Denair, CA
• From the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton (just above San Jose):  lookout vistas: Diablo Range
• From a Turlock High School science teacher in his post, Phreatic Ramblings: A little help for my friends:  " If they maneuver to the correct vantage point just outside of Turlock's city limits they can see directly up Yosemite Valley to the tops of El Cap and Half Dome!"
• From Museum of Hoaxes, Can you see Half Dome from the Central Valley? (Status: True)

Today, I got a rare chance to see if one could see Half Dome from Hwy 99 in Turlock. It was one of those crystal-clear days following a big storm that passed through last night. AND, I was driving through Turlock on Freeway 99.

Having worked on the maps and lines posted above, I knew the line crossed through the northern part of Turlock, crossing the 99 at about Monte Vista Ave. So we stopped -- on the freeway shoulder with cars whizzing by -- and I got the pictures below.

On the side of Freeway 99.


Approximately what I could see with naked eye:


Zoomed in at 16x


This picture is a crop of the above picture:



All the pictures are in my Smugmug album: Half Dome from Denair

Well, I'll be...

I hereby recant any doubt on my behalf.

Amazing...


Have fun...

Nuff said. Proven to be true by our own Steve C.

Tony Immoos sent me links to a nice map he created by using a handy map tool at HeyWhatsThat.com (aka HWT)

See it yourself: Half Dome on HWT.

Tony's flickr page is here:  Half Dome Viewing Area

Here's his map created using the "Visibility Cloak" feature on the HWT.

Click on the picture for the huge view.

Here's how Tony created the big map:
Thank you, Tony!!!

I did not know about HeyWhatsThat.com until now.  It's a great site -- should be handy for generating some nice profiles and maps.

More interesting views...

Here is a picture showing Half Dome taken from Dewey Point, which is a few miles west of Half Dome on the rim of Yosemite Valley.



And this picture is taken from the same point, looking west toward the coast range. The two peaks are Mt Isabel and Mt. Hamilton, above San Jose, 112 miles away!



The pictures above got me to looking around, and I found the image below from Viewfinder Panoramas (see gallery, Copernicus Peak)  The image is taken from Copernicus Peak on Mt. Hamilton.
Here is the annotated view from Copernicus.
In the annotated view, Half Dome is not identified, but it is obvious between and below "Kuna" and "Parsons".
If you view the Original size version of this picture, see if you can spot Half Dome--It's a little right of center.
(click on the image to see the original size)


Here is the same photo, annotated by Wayne Pyle:



And finally, this is a crop taken from the full-size view of the picture above.  It's width takes in the same peaks shown in the original picture of the grain elevator taken by Tony Immoos from Denair.

My family lives in Salida, I can't wait to keep my eyes peeled my next trip home!

I stopped by the sign and snapped a picture Jan 1, 2012. Dry conditions this year really underscores the message on the sign.
(The sign is about 4 miles east of Crane Flat on Tioga Road in Yosemite.)

This entire thread is really, really interesting! Thanks so much for posting this.

Sheldon Neill of "Yosemite HD Timelapse Video" fame took this shot from the top of Half Dome.
The lights of the Central Valley are in full view.



This picture is found here.

hmm - I thought no overnight use of Half Dome, last time I checked...



so all you gotta do is "we're taking some night photos" and you're still ok to spend the night up there? Or you have to get your butt down before midnight? Probably a matter of "who's gonna check?"

Main reason I have not been back to Half Dome in now over 20 years is the above sign. The last time I was up there we did spend the night, almost alone.

The permitting rangers are random and some shifts are at night.

You can walk around up there at night but you cannot set up camp.

> You can walk around up there at night but you cannot set up camp.

'Zactly. A local Sierra Club hike leader in the past led annual midnight hikes: watch the sunrise, then exit. He related how the park people phoned him and reminded him there was no camping. He insisted they weren't camping. If you're up there without bedding or a tent, you're not camping.

ah yes, creative rule interpretation. The sign doesn't say "overnight stay" after all

What if you're up there, no food, no stove, no tent, you have a wilderness permit, your main camp is down by the junction, but you're inside a sleeping bag so you don't freeze to death, and sleeping next to a camera that's taking an 8 hour time-lapse of the milky way?

Man, this sounds too familiar.

We left the majority of our gear at our campsite in 'Little Yosemite Valley' but like everyone's stated above, as long as there's no camping, you're fine.

We were up there from 6PM to about 11AM the following day. We didn't sleep, but we ate food occasionally and looked up at the stars while we watched our timelapses finish. We had our sleeping bags--just in case--it got too cold, but at some point I even took off my jacket because it was so nice. When you get shots like this, its totally worth it:




We were up on the summit of half-dome alone for about 12 hours. It wasn't until sunrise we actually had some visitors. However we later had a ranger come up the cables because there was a death from a climber who fell when reaching for the 7th pitch on the north visor--which Colin and I witnessed, and had a radio to listen in on.

The chilling part is that same ranger--Ryan Hiller btw--that had us fill out a witness report, and tell him what all our camera gear was for--was killed a day after our Yosemite HD release. You can ready the story and see a photo with him(in August the day before we did our timelapses on half-dome) and us here:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/20...ters-state.html

It gives me the chills thinking about it, but to keep it simple, if you ever plan on doing something like this, realize the risk and danger involved. Be aware of weather--we were up when we had clear skies for a whole weekend--and have plenty of water. Its kinda odd that no one caught on that we did this, but then again, I'm just now seeing this. Too funny.

What photography permits from the NPS hoops did you guys have to go through?