Half Dome, Yosemite National Park

You come around the bend, the pines part, and Half Dome is just there, framed for you, with a double yellow line running your eye straight into it. I had been looking at that rock all day from other angles, but this is the version you actually see first — through a windshield, from a road. Every photograph of this thing is one somebody has already taken, which stopped bothering me a long time ago. You do not pull over for an original angle. You pull over because it is Half Dome.