Where Earth Becomes Abstract

 Some places in Yellowstone stop looking like a landscape and start looking like a painting.

I found this scene in a small, almost overlooked patch of the park, where water, rock, moss, and mineral deposits had created a world of their own. The colors seemed impossible: deep blacks and greens giving way to ochre, rust, gold, and electric blue. What looked from a distance like an aerial view of vast, unfamiliar terrain was actually an intimate piece of the Yosemite landscape.

I was drawn to the way the water had carved its own pathways through the surface, creating islands, borders, and continents that seemed to shift depending on where I stood. The longer I looked, the less it resembled something geological and the more it felt like an abstract painting made by the earth itself.

Yosemite is often photographed for its monumental scale, but some of its most compelling moments happen when you stop looking at the mountains and start looking closely at what is beneath your feet.