Georgetown window no. 2
Didn’t notice until just now that there’s someone’s head in this photo. I think I’m going to take care of that when I’m less tired. Georgetown was crowded late Saturday afternoon, probably with other folks who had headed out to see the aspens.
Georgetown window no. 1
Getting away from travel-related posts here for awhile and back toward art photography.
For yesterday’s drive I skirted Denver on the west side and took U.S. Hwy. 285 over to Kenosha Pass and down to South Park. I’d been keen to see this part of Colorado ever since I read a magazine writer’s comment that, though he’d been many places in the world, the view down across South Park from the pass was his favorite. Not ever having watched the animated series “South Park,” I didn’t know that it was named after a real place. (There is also a North Park, northwest of Rocky Mountain National Park.) The designation “park” here refers to a broad plateau or basin ringed by mountains.
I stopped to eat lunch at Fairplay, then took state route 9 up through Alma (10,578 feet elev.), and over Hoosier Pass (as it turns out, there are two Hoosier Passes in Colorado, both of them—I presume—originally sited in Indiana, then trucked west and greatly enlarged). A series of hairpin turns on the other side of the pass takes you down to Breckinridge. There were still golden-leafed aspens along 285 east of Kenosha Pass and in Breckinridge; elsewhere, the aspens were mostly bare. Given the abundance of stands on the slopes, it must have looked spectacular a couple of weeks ago. Now I know an ideal driving route for seeing the fall colors in Colorado.
Never Summer Wilderness
View west from Trail Ridge Road to the Never Summer Wilderness.
Yesterday I took my sister for a 7-hour drive to see the aspens in their fall colors. We drove from Loveland to Boulder, up Boulder Canyon, down the Peak-to-Peak Highway, up Hwy. 40 to Granby, up Hwy. 34 to Rocky Mountain National Park, and across Trail Ridge Road. We didn’t stop for photos very often, but here are a few.
I’ve finally heard an elk bugle, and it’s an impressive sound. This fellow in the Beaver Meadows section of Rocky Mountain National Park had a harem of five females and a youngster. Just before I took this photo, he bugled out a couple of announcements to other males that might be in the vicinity: Here I am, and I’m better than you are. Herds of elk also could be seen above the treeline across a great valley from the Alpine Visitors Center; from that distance they looked like dozens of little brown rocks, just dots on the landscape. Before long they’ll be thronging the streets of Estes Park.
Today I drove Old Fall River Road up to the Alpine Visitors Center in Rocky Mountain National Park. This route was the first road through the park. Today it’s one-way (uphill) and nine miles of it are dirt. Very little of it runs above the tree line, so it affords very different views than you find from Trail Ridge Road.
At the Visitors Center one can climb “Huffers Hill,” which rises a bit over 200 feet in elevation, taking you to 12,005 feet. I didn’t think I could get up there, but with a lot of rests, I did, and a kind young woman offered to take my photo at the elevation sign. Normally I don’t include myself in photographs, but I was happy and proud that I’d made this climb—such a little thing to most people, but a big thing for me—so it seemed okay to make an exception. It was 46 degrees and very windy. Gloves would have been a good idea; also a scarf and a more suitable hat.
On the way up I was passed by a talkative group of Japanese tourists. When I reached the top, they were taking pictures with their phones. I walked on to the sign at the end of the trail. When I turned back, I saw that they had all sat down, some on the ground and some on a rock outcrop—silent, eyes closed. They were meditating. Their silence was of a piece with the silence of the stones. Only the wind could be heard. Theirs seemed the most apropros response to the landscape, and I considered sitting with them, but I was afraid if I sat down I wouldn’t be able to get up again. The coldness of my ears also argued against any possibility of meditating, so I walked back down (much harder on the legs than the walk up, but a nice respite for lungs and heart).
A final, four-part love letter to the rock walls of Canyon Country.
The north section of Arches National Park, which has the most trails, was closed for road repairs and construction when we visited, and another popular section was so crowded that no parking spots were available. My companion and I found ourselves both suffering from a world-too-much-with-us malaise. (See here my post A plea for public lands, or better yet, read Desert Solitaire by the very prescient Edward Abbey.) We ended up just getting out at a couple of overlooks and then walking a very short trail to Sand Dune Arch. That arch isn’t pictured here: I left my camera in the car because of the strong, gusty wind; sand grains stung the skin and tourists without sunglasses were shielding their eyes. Sand Dune Arch is sandwiched between tall fins of rock that form a little slot canyon, the bottom of which is piled deep with sand of a uniformly red color (due to its iron content). Burrowing my hand into it, I discovered that it was the finest-grained sand I’ve ever felt, almost velvety, perhaps because it is eroded from rock only rather than being a mixture of rock and marine shell.
So the only arch in my photographs was taken, ironically, at Canyonlands. At the north end of this park, a paved road travels south along a skinny mesa appropriately called Island in the Sky. The mesa is a long finger pointing down into the heart of the labyrinthine canyon systems that make up the bulk of the park, hundreds of feet below and extending for miles east, south, and west. Mesa Arch, which is pictured here, stands on the eastern edge of Island in the Sky midway between the visitors center and the end of the road, Grand View Point. By the time we got there, the sun was at the horizon.
In tiling these photos, WordPress has made the big small and the small big. It’s fitting. This landscape is so vast that gigantic land formations, even mountains, are small on the horizon when seen from distances of 20, 50, 100 miles. And only when you take the time to pay attention close at hand do you realize how many plant species are blooming all around you, dwarfed by the rock.
VAPOR AND FLOW 