Daybreak in the Eastern Sierras brings light and color to desert texture that is simultaneously mysterious and beautiful. The colors change very quickly. As the sun rises and the cloud cover shifts, the sagebrush glows in pink, red, brown, and green tones, while the snow capped Sierras are tinged in amber. For a few moments, the desert floor appeared as a reddish brown sea of sage, leading our eye to richly colored hills of the same color, and that is the instant of color I’ve preserved here. Red is the most powerful of all colors, and when it appears in such scale in nature, it can be breathtaking. The snows of the Sierra Nevada Mountains add context to give this image its identity as high desert.