The exact date of these images is June 9, 1962. Joel just turned 41 and he treats himself on a trip to Yosemite, his second one.
These negatives were found across two sleeves with a “Yosemite, June 9, 1962” note on them.
Joel focuses on Half Dome during this trip, and one more location I’ll cover in a future post.
Joel’s tripod never changes location during this session. The only items changing are few cloud positions, the moon, and traffic and hikers. Traffic is light, a far cry of what we get to see now. The valley floor no longer looks the same, these images are time capsules.
If one looks closely, you can see the moon in the top center of the image, to the right of Half Dome. The images are in order of rising moon.
Six images is plenty to have a good one to print, and all indication is that Joel printed quite a few of them on 11×14″ format.
Cheers !
Finding Joel Pahl Dardis 