Stuck inside during the COVID pandemic? Suffering some cabin fever and dreaming of wild and beautiful places like Yosemite National Park? This book by biologist and photographer Robb Hirsch might help relieve the pain just a little.

From its panoramic cover portrait of Half Dome and Yosemite’s Vernal and Nevada Falls, to the closing double-page spread of a snowy Merced River with Half Done in the distance, this book is a feast of marvelous photography. From Carleton Watkins in the 19th century to the present, legions of photographers have taken Yosemite as their subject, and one has to ask how anyone today can find new ways to capture the beauty of this iconic place.

Hirsch certainly has in The Nature of Yosemite.

In this paperbound, 11 x 11 inch modestly priced book, Hirsch captures what he calls “ephemeral magic moments,” such moments created by clouds, snow, rainfall, moving water, sunsets and sunrises, reflections, and rainbows and many more ephemera. To capture images like these Hirsch has come to intimately know the Yosemite landscape, to know just when to go and where to portray this place in new ways. He uses both color and black and white, panoramas and closeups, backlit flowering mountain dogwood and bigleaf maple against a background of swiftly flowing water, time exposed whorls of leaves in the Merced River, and reflections of towering rock walls in the same stream. Most of his images offer new angles as he intentionally avoids what he calls “iconic locations.”

How do you capture the essence of such a place in a 128-page book? Hirsch admits this is an impossible aspiration, but divides his subject into sections on valleys, flora, high country, fauna, and wilderness. He invited 13 writers intimately familiar with each category to contribute brief essays about the essence of their topic.

Artist James McGrew, for example, offers a brief overview of how art has influenced the history of Yosemite.  As a contemporary painter his goal “in painting Yosemite is to carry on the legacy of historical artists and photographers who have inspired appreciation and protection for more than 150 years.” Of Ansel Adams, Yosemite’s most famous photographer, he writes, “His unique style focused on emotional impact as he expressed his personal passion, working tirelessly as an environmentalist. Adams’s images inspired the public and politicians alike.”

Hirsch carries on the Adams’s artistic effort to inspire about this place.

In his essay on Sierra wildflowers, naturalist and educator Dan Webster informs readers that the Sierra Nevada, according to the World Wildlife Fund, “is home to 50 percent of the plant species found in California, including four hundred endemics and two hundred rare species.”

Endemics are plants found nowhere else. Geographer and wildfire expert Kurt Menning shares insights into the resilience of nature and how he has seen it in Yosemite after many fires. Climate change will extend fire seasons, he admits, and asks, “How will we respond to wildfires that mar the scenery? Certainly there will be days of smoky haze occluding long, clear vistas. Yet after the fires pass, life will flourish, raining down from above, arriving on the wind, pushing up from below, and traveling across the land. Once again, the air will clear, and the Range of Light will shine.”

Menning’s writing exemplifies the eloquence of all the essayists who complement Hirsch’s exquisite photographs.

John Muir Laws writes in the forward:

As powerful humans, we have the ability, privilege, and responsibility to act on behalf of nature. This work is challenging and taxing, but nature gives us patience and perseverance to do what we need to do. So wake early on a frosty morning. Step out into nature. Look for wonder and beauty, get curious, look deeply, and be moved. Nourish your heart in nature and let that love move you.

Rob Hirsch had to rise early and stay late to make the marvelous photos in this book. He teaches us new ways to look at the natural world and his work is testimony to the “patience and perseverance,” Laws mentions.

In his introduction we find Hirsch in Yosemite’s Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias, sheltering from a rainstorm, hoping for a shot of the clearing storm at sunset. “Despite the discomfort – and the low odds of success – there is no place I would rather be.” He would be out there, he writes, even if he were not a photographer. “I’m not in nature because I’m a photographer, I’m a photographer because I love being in nature. Whether my subjects are wildlife or landscapes, photography gives me opportunities to connect to the world at a sensory level.”

As I experienced this book – and I say “experienced” rather than read or browsed – I kept having “wow!” moments, marveling at the scene or subject Hirsch had captured so creatively. Sometimes, in lengthy captions, he would explain what I was seeing, or how he got the shot.

“Experiencing” a book about a place like this is no substitute for actually going there, of course, but I was reminded that most of us might make a short visit, or even a moderately long backpack, but there is absolutely no way we could experience the clearing storms, the sunsets, the remarkable moments of light like a moonbow at Upper Yosemite Falls. This book gives us a sense of the potentials of this remarkable place, something a lifelong explorer of Yosemite like Hirsch can realize and share with we who can only briefly visit.

Hirsch and his contributing authors remind us that no place in the world remains unchanged – that is the nature of nature. But at the same time, no places, even Yosemite, can be protected from human degradation without vigilance by those who love them.

No human being appears in any photograph in The Nature of Yosemite except the man behind the camera. Yet we know people are there, threatening change by their numbers, “managing” the landscapes, threatening the very air over the Sierra with pollution elsewhere.

In the wilderness section of the book Hirsch and his two contributors, geologist Greg Stock and wildlife biologist Brock Dolman, don’t mention that 95 percent of Yosemite National Park is classified as wilderness under the Wilderness Act of 1964. They don’t have to. Hirsch’s images speak to the wild values of the place, and the writers testify that here natural processes work as they have for millions of years.

In such protected places as Yosemite National Park, the nature of nature and the inspiration it provides flows on and, with the inspiration of experiences of this nature, whether we can be there or must imagine it with the help of artists like Hirsch, our lives are enriched.