MOUNTAIN PHOTOGRAPHY is part of the L.A. weather cycle. Heavy rains bring clear air, which reminds people in the city center that there are mountains behind the air, which then leads to an avalanche of peak pics in our social media feeds.
This rainfall season saw the cycle play out multiple times, and some of the resulting photos generated a lot of engagement online. Here’s one from photographer Mark Girardeau that racked up fifteen thousand likes:
An image of Mount Baldy over Newport Beach, with caption. (@orangecountyoutdoors on Instagram)
But this shot was not without controversy. Dozens of commenters showed up on Instagram and Facebook — mostly Facebook — to accuse Girardeau of fraud.
Many other pictures of the mountains that went viral this winter were met with the same skepticism.
“Mountains aren’t that close - AI folks,” responded Threads user @kathyfulton_bpp to a dramatic tableau by Stephen Velasco.
“Images like this crack me up,” added @rusticchicana in response to a glamour shot posted by @quancyclayborne. “They give the impression that Downtown Los Angeles is right up against the mountains, which it’s not.”
The volume of negative comments eventually drove Girardeau to post a response to the responses, a video in which he takes a boat offshore and demonstrates how he got the shot with a telephoto lens. “A lot of people call it Mount Photoshop,” he says. “I get a lot of death threats.”
So are these images reflective of our geographic reality? Or are they a scam to mislead outsiders? How far are the mountains from the City of Los Angeles, really?
The answer, technically, is that at least some of the mountains are WITHIN the City of Los Angeles.
Mount Lukens, the highest peak within the city borders, stands at 5,075 feet of elevation from sea level and almost 1,800 feet over surrounding neighborhoods in Sunland-Tujunga — looming over City of L.A. residents even more than Mammoth does over its neighboring towns.
Maybe you’d prefer to interrogate the distance between the mountains and the city center. Lukens is about 15 miles from Downtown L.A. — that’s the same distance between the foothills of the Rockies and Denver, a city much more often thought to be “right up against the mountains.”
If we’re talking about downtown’s proximity to the highest peaks in the region, Mount Baldy (technically Mount San Antonio, the tallest in L.A. County at 10,064 feet) is about 40 miles from downtown.
That’s significantly closer than Mount Hood is to downtown Portland (more than 50 miles) or Mount Rainier to Seattle’s Space Needle (about 70), to cite two postcard-ready skylines that seldom generate complaints of doctoring.
Baldy also rises more than 6,000 feet over the land immediately around it, making it what topographers call an “ultra-prominent peak” — one of only about 1,500 on the planet.
Portland and Seattle’s peaks are more ultra-prominent, though. Mount Rainier, rising 13,210 feet over the flats under the Cascade Range, is actually the most prominent mountain in the contiguous United States, which is why you can see it from Seattle on the roughly ten weeks a year that it isn’t too cloudy.
So L.A. has a very credible resume when it comes to being a mountain city. And to be clear, most social media responses to the photos have acknowledged and celebrated L.A.’s topographic gifts.
Said @sgt_shrapnel_the_can_corso, a Threads account for a dog, in a reply to one of the photos: ”I love how far spread out we are and we are all enjoying the same beautiful view.”
