What's your favorite vista of all time?

+1 for White Mountain Peak on a clear day. Looking across the Owens Valley with the snow-capped High Sierra at eye level is pretty special.

The top of Telescope Peak on a clear day with Death Valley and Badwater at -282 feet on one side, Panamint Valley on the other, and Mount Whitney at +14,505 in the distance. Sometimes you’ll see supersonic Navy and Air Force jets flying well below you.

The top of Mount San Jacinto when the low clouds are in. The LA megalopolis hides beneath a white pillowy blanket, with just the top of San Gorgonio Mountain in the distance. On a clear day, you can see beyond the Salton Sea to Mexico.

Naturalist John Muir wrote: “The view from San Jacinto is the most sublime spectacle to be found anywhere on this earth!”

I haven’t been to some of these peaks in over 40 years, but the memories are fresh.

Thanks!

— Rex

“Vista” means “a pleasing view” and my favorite vistas have to include snow and tents—two of my favorite subjects.

I really like Red Against White—

And I really like doing flash night shots of a tent in a blizzard!!

My best vistas have to include a tent—

Thank you Rex for evoking Muir…who mustve called 100 vistas the ‘finest he ever beheld’.

When he writes of his initial arrival in California (My first summer in the Sierra connected, methinks), he writes of a vista that has always stayed in my mind, because of how well and how colorfully it stokes my imagination. He sets out to walk from San Francisco or Oakland towards the valley… Upon reaching the crest of the East Bay Hills, at Pacheco Pass, he glimpses for the first time the Great Central Valley. What he describes makes me think of the pastels of a Renaissance painter… An ocean of wildflowers as far as the eye can see, endless purple and yellow.

Fun to imagine that great valley in that condition…prior to its rape & plunder!

I agree. Bighorn plateau. I feel at peace there

Where were these beautiful photos taken?