Yosemite HD II Time-Lapse: 200 Miles of Backpacking Through the Park

Yosemite HD II is a five-minute portrait of Yosemite National Park through all four seasons, made by California photographers Colin Delehanty and Sheldon Neill. To shoot it they backpacked more than 200 miles over about ten months, spending a combined 45 days in the park and filming at more than two dozen locations, many of them far from any road.

From Yosemite HD to Yosemite HD II

The pair's first film, Yosemite HD, came out in 2012 after three months of shooting. It was widely shared, but Delehanty and Neill felt they could do better, and that most of the park still lay outside their frame. For the sequel they aimed for the high country as much as the famous valley views, returning to several sites more than once to catch the right weather.

The finished film went online on Vimeo in early March 2014 under the banner of Project Yosemite, set to M83's "Lower Your Eyelids to Die with the Sun". National Geographic featured it a few days later, on 10 March 2014.

The hardest shots in the film

National Geographic walked through three of the most demanding locations:

• Echo Ridge, Cathedral Range (opening shot): a five-hour round trip to a perch about 3.5 miles (5.6 km) from the nearest road, at 11,062 ft (3,372 m). "It was freezing cold, and there wasn't much of a surface area," Neill said. The reward was a Sierra Wave, the wave cloud that can form over the range.
• Clouds Rest (1:12): a summit of more than 9,921 ft (3,024 m), about 14 miles (22 km) from the valley. Delehanty hiked in through deep snow without snowshoes or waterproof boots, stayed up for 24 hours shooting, and melted snow for drinking water.
• The Diving Board (4:00): a rock ledge facing the sheer northwest face of Half Dome. The team crossed the back side of Half Dome in February 2013 to reach it, and when fog filled the valley, "the Diving Board was the only area where there was visibility," Neill said. Ansel Adams made his famous photograph "The Monolith" from the same spot in April 1927.

How time-lapse shows Yosemite

A time-lapse records one frame every few seconds and plays the sequence back at normal speed, so hours of cloud, shadow and star movement pass in seconds. In Yosemite that turns granite walls into fixed stages for moving weather: fog pouring over ridges, the Milky Way wheeling above the cliffs, light sweeping across Half Dome at sunset.

The technique demands patience. A single shot can mean a long hike, hours of waiting. Delehanty and Neill thanked Dynamic Perception, gear-rental firm BorrowLenses and Mountain Hardwear for support, which hints at how much equipment went up the trails on their backs.

Visiting the places in the film

Yosemite lies about 150 miles (240 km) east of San Francisco and covers 761,266 acres of the Sierra Nevada. The valley viewpoints are open all year, while the high-country sites of the film, such as Clouds Rest and the Cathedral Range, are summer and early-autumn hikes for most visitors. Overnight trips into the wilderness need a permit from the National Park Service. Go prepared in winter: snow closes the high roads and turns the same trails into serious mountaineering.

Explore more: New Zealand condensed into a landscape film; Teide’s changing sky.

Related reading

• Shawn Reeder’s Yosemite Range of Light
• Farmington’s February 2013 Blizzard in Backyard Time-Lapse
• New York’s January 2014 Snowstorm in Time-Lapse
• Nate Bolt’s San Francisco-to-Paris Flight Time-Lapse

Sources