At the tail end of a 5-day backpacking trip through the John Muir Wilderness I woke up to that rarest of Sierra sights: clouds in the sky at morning. After shooting the blazingly colorful sunrise near the shores of the lowest Pioneer Basin lake I was amped up and excited to continue photographing. I wandered up one of Mono Creek’s tributaries looking for interesting compositions and came across this bend in the stream. A deep, wide pool caused the creek flow to slow down to a snail’s pace, allowing perfect reflections to form in the surface of the water. The clouds overhead diffused the morning sunlight on the landscape and with the help of a GND I was able to capture the painterly light bathing the scene.