Breathtaking!
I looked him up on Wikipedia, and just finished downloading that one to iPhoto. Spectacular.
I did the Mt. Whitney day hike from Whitney Portal this past summer, and saw the Sierras in person. It’s beautiful beyond belief.
Bierstadt traveled to Yosemite with the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Ludlow described his feelings upon seeing Yosemite, fitting to the original topic of this thread:
“We did not so much seem to be seeing from that crag of vision a new scene on the old familiar globe as a new heaven and a new earth into which the creative spirit had just been breathed. I hesitate now, as I did then, at the attempt to give my vision utterance. Never were words so beggared for an abridged translation of any Scripture of Nature.”