One of the highlights of the west → east flight from Northern California is the chance to get views over the ranges of California, Nevada, and Colorado. The first leg of my flight home this week took me from San Jose to Denver, offering up those snow-capped mountains I so rarely get to see living in the southeast.

Not too far into the flight you come upon the Sierra Nevada, if you’re lucky passing right over the Yosemite Valley. Today there was a thin, low cloud layer over the mountains, so the view wasn’t perfectly clear, but I caught pretty great views of the peaks and notches of the high Sierras.

The folds of the basin and range province as you pass over Nevada are some of my favorite landforms to check out from the air — 500 miles of alternating faulted mountains and flatlands.