A Young Photographer and a Granite Wall: Ansel Adams Captures Half Dome

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Ansel Adams, “Monolith, the Face of Half Dome,” 1927. Public domain.

On a chilly spring morning in Yosemite National Park, a 25-year-old photographer named Ansel Adams hiked up the steep LeConte Gully with his fiancée Virginia Best and a small group of friends, hauling a heavy wooden camera and a handful of glass plates toward a destination he had dreamed of for years: the Diving Board, a sheer granite ledge more than 3,500 feet above the valley floor.