Words and pictures by Sophie

We’d been following the increasingly alarming weather reports warning of huge weather systems massing over the Californian High Sierras.  Headed for Yosemite National Park, we decided to bring the journey forward by 24 hours. Our destination was the Ahwahnee – one of only two hotels in the Park – a 15 mile drive of some 40 minutes from the gates…

…in normal conditions.

I kept looking at the green rectangle of the sat nav announcing our distance from the approaching storm; the stealthy bleaching of the landscape; a strange light – both bright and muted.

Then the first flakes begin to fall; fast-settling on the white car – muffling and enclosing, wipers struggle against the weight of snow.  Soon the only colours the red tail lights and yellow warning signs. We lose signal.

The quiet before a storm …and I hold my breath.

Tyres lose grip. Uneasy feeling of slip and slide. We need to put the chains on the wheels, but it’s a impossible task.  A rescue-truck driver, called Zack, we’ve flagged down has promised to return.

I’m not sure what I thought about as we waited, perhaps an hour. The snow descended and quickly seemed to inter the car. Silenced at how quickly the known world changes, I sat very still.

Then, Zack returned and fitted the chains. We follow a snow plough’s  slow path up and then down into the valley.  A grey white world, the dots of red tail lights; the rising black tree trunks, the strange shapes fallen snow makes weighing down and draping the branches. A wide bend in the road, and where you’d expect a glorious vista,  a void, a grey white whirl of …nothing.

Then it’s a long tunnel cut into the rock, its sulferous yellow  lights marking the ‘threshold zone’ before reaching the Valley floor.   I catch my first sight of El Capitan, the waterfall flowing  and it’s suddenly the grandeur of Ansel Adams before us.

15 miles of mountain road in Big Weather felt a very long way. Perhaps just as well I only learnt later that Stanley Kubrick used the Ahwahnee as inspiration for ‘The Shining’!

I replay ‘frames’ from that heart-in-mouth, sublime journey, trying to capturing in watercolour and pastel sketches its  strange mood and feeling.