I can recommend a lot of the things that I’ve experienced during my lifetime.
Eating excessive amounts of chocolate? Absolutely. Standing on a dark mountaintop as the Milky Way arches overhead? Of course. Witnessing a total solar eclipse? 100%, assuming you don’t have any aversions to experiencing pure joy and wonderment.
I don’t, however, recommend driving from eastern Tennessee to the Rocky Mountains in two days.
After spending a few days photographing in Great Smoky Mountains National Park with David Johnston, I woke up with a 4 a.m. alarm so that I could pack up my gear and get an early start making my way west. It was Day 5 of a 37-day cross-country photography road trip and I wanted to maximize my time in the western United States.
After trying to meticulously remove all of the ants that had commandeered the outside of my tent during my few days in the Smokies, I loaded up my car and drove west towards Columbia, Missouri, where I would later enjoy a warm bed and my first shower in days. All in all, it was 11 hours of driving, which didn’t include stops for bathroom breaks, eating, and topping off the gas tank.
I expected Day 6 to be another 10 hours of driving. However, after turning on my GPS before leaving Missouri, I immediately realized that I had made a mistake during my planning, and what actually stood between me and the Rocky Mountains ended up being 13.5 hours of Kansas and a few parts of Missouri and Colorado that looked suspiciously like Kansas. Until I reached the Rockies, the most exciting thing I saw that day was a Mack truck towing a Mack truck towing a Mack truck towing a Mack truck. Seriously, none of that was a typo. And I’m 80% sure that none of it was a hallucination either.
I arrived in Estes Park, Colorado knowing that my only goal for the evening was to find dinner, plan out my priorities for the next few days, and sleep. A good night’s rest was going to be a necessity, so I planned to sleep through sunrise and head into Rocky Mountain National Park during the morning hours following first light.
Based on the recommendations I received from several locals the night before, I spent my time the next day exploring both by car and on foot. I fought with unpredictable weather throughout the day, turning back during hikes after being enveloped by snow squalls and graupel in the mountains and sitting in my car while steady rain soaked the meadows at lower elevations. During that time, I listened to photography podcasts to keep my brain interested in using my camera since fatigue and the day’s weather had begun to make me lose the motivation needed to try to capture any more photos.
Thankfully, one of those podcasts included an interview with landscape photographer Gavin Hardcastle, in which he described photography as an activity that provides large emotional swings between misery and euphoria. Hearing those words helped me to acknowledge the likely chance that I might finish up the day without any photos I was happy with, but also reminded me of all of the times that the pursuit of a landscape photo has provided me with moments of peaceful calmness or joyful exhilaration. Knowing that I didn’t want to waste my time in such a beautiful place, I continued to explore, hoping that the bad weather might break, or that I would at least find locations I could shoot in the following day and a half before I continued on to Utah.
Before leaving the meadows for higher elevations, the persistent rain blowing in from the mountains managed to subside for just a few minutes. Planning only to stretch my legs during the break in the storm, the weather decided to give me a gift for my patience, and the sun burst through a gap in the clouds just long enough to place a vibrant rainbow over the meadow. I grabbed my camera and fired off a series of shots as quickly as possible, not realizing until much later that I may have gotten a photo that I was happy with. The view in the photo below was visible for only a minute or so before the sun retreated and the drenching rain resumed.
After a bit more exploring, during which I was met with high winds and sometimes whiteout conditions, I stopped at an overlook on the eastern side of the park and saw signs that the storm was beginning to break. The driving snow began to subside and the wind speeds noticeably decreased. Within a few minutes, the clouds started to part, allowing shafts of sunlight to burst through them, dappling the landscape with pockets of intense late-day glow. Just like that I went from cranky, dejected mood to one of renewed excitement, which served to remind me of why I love to explore and shoot landscapes.
The weather the next day significantly improved, allowing me to spend my morning hiking around the Bear Lake area of the park. My initial hike took me to Mills Lake via miles of snow-packed trails. During the first mile of hiking, sections of the trail were closely lined by groves of trees, many of which had been vandalized by those who thought it was important to carve into the bark their names, initials, or the names and initials of their significant other with a heart around them. I’m not exaggerating when I say that there were times when you could stand in one spot on the trail and have dozens of trees around you covered with this scarring. To those people who carved their names or initials, I hope you don’t do it again--its damaging to the trees and encourages others to do the same. To those couples who did the same and carved a heart around the letters...I hope you broke up.
I spent over an hour sitting at about 10,000 feet above sea level alongside Mills Lake, relaxing as the sun warmed the fresh snowfall from the day before. I set up my tripod, waiting to see if the passing clouds would help create some good photographic light, and listened to the sounds of the snow-melt trickling into the lake and the cracking of ice echoing across the partially frozen surface. As time pushed on, the bright, late-morning sun continued to create harsh shadows that weren’t ideal for photography; so, after feeling rested, I got up and made my way back down the trail.
Evening brought much better conditions for photography, with relatively clear skies over the meadows of the eastern portion of the park. I parked in a turnout and walked aimlessly down a trail into a nearby meadow, eventually discovering during my wandering that small barrel cacti are apparently native to the area. After finding a view of the mountains that I liked, I set up my camera and fired off shots as the snow-capped peaks drifted in and out of passing squalls.
The next morning--my last in the Rockies--I arrived at the park while it was still dark. I was unsure if the forecasts for partly cloudy skies would prove to be accurate, but my hope was ultimately for a sunrise that would complement a view of a vast alpine meadow flanked by some of the dramatic, snow-capped peaks of the Rocky Mountains. Instead, as sunrise approached, I realized that I was stuck under a dense blanket of fog that wasn’t going to burn off until well after sunrise.
Weighing my options, I decided to see if I could get above the fog. I drove up into the mountains, passing by herds of elk grazing along the sides of the road in the mist. Eventually, I came around a corner and the haze quickly gave way to clear skies. Not wanting to miss taking advantage of such dynamic conditions, I parked nearby and ran to a lookout point I had found the day before.
As the sun rose over the nearby mountains a few minutes later, the slow, rolling blanket of fog started to burn off with the heat from the sun, allowing its shafts of light to start bursting through gaps in the trees. The resulting photos show some of those moments and serve as yet another reason why I’ve never regretted waking up early to see the sun rise.
From my perch overlooking the meadows where I had initially started my morning, I could see that the fog that had been blanketing them was lifting. So, I made my way back down to them before leaving the park en route to Utah. By the time I arrived, the sun had risen high enough that portions of the nearby meadows were flooded with warm golden light, which provided me an opportunity to capture isolated slices of the otherwise expansive landscape. Moments like that, during which I stand back and calmly observe a scene as the slowly changing light presents me with possible compositions, are some of my favorites in photography.
Rocky Mountain National Park is absolutely awe-inspiring, but it was a stop on my trip for which I had done very little planning. As a result, I also had very few expectations, which meant that the towering snow-capped peaks and expansive meadows below easily surpassed what I had envisioned. The way I had structured my trip, which consisted of staying in certain areas no more than a few days at a time, my ability to experience any one of those areas was inevitably going to be limited compared to what I could explore in a longer time frame. Because of this, I barely scratched the surface of what Rocky Mountain National Park had to offer, but it still provided me with its fair share of memorable moments and served as a turning point in an important transition into the coming month that I would be spending on the road.
Next Stop: Arches National Park.
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