At 7400 ft Echo Lake is nestled near tree line in a deep valley that borders the barren and glacially carved reaches of the Desolation Wilderness in the Sierra Nevada of California. Many cabins have been preserved and maintained by descendants of the original families who built cabins on Forest Service lands in the early 1900s. The area is remote and cabins can be reached only by foot, or by boat crossing the Upper and Lower Echo Lakes.
One needn’t have a photographer’s eye to appreciate the dramatic scale, the ancient, tangled Juniper roots embedded in granite fissures, the delicate wildflowers whose tones range in color from intense warm to cool in the heat of summer, the bulbous contours of polished granite, the burnished light of alpenglow.