Fall 2022 in SW Colorado

Day 8

Woke up to clear skies. Typically I'd not be happy with this, but this morning was different. This morning, I planned to shoot the morning's first light reflecting off of Wilson Peak through the window of an old cabin window in a ghost town.

The first shoot of the day went well. Here’s a little BTS clip from the shoot…

In the second shoot, I was only along for moral support as I'd shot it before. The destination was the curved aspen trees near Telluride. I shot a few hand-held shots and ended up pleased with a few of them, but they need a bit of love in the post-processing department, so I’ll add a few from a prior trip here at least until I get some new ones finished. :-)

We got to the trees and weren't the first ones there, but we didn't expect to be as it was our second stop of the day. Regardless, we squeezed in and ended up with a few decent shots. As mentioned above, I’ve got some in the queue to be edited that I think are nice. Ensuring they are printable will be the only difficulty as I did shoot them handheld.

From there, we moved to Ridgeway and to Kate's Place; always a decent stop. If you are passing through Ridgeway during the breakfast hours, I recommend the place. From there, we were on to Owl Creek and a tough hike.

My bones are getting old and beginning to not agree with hiking. This hike, however, would make anyone hurt. Our destination was up the ridges to an overlook that provides a nice vantage point to shoot Chimney Rock. The hike was up, then up, and then up some more, but so worth it! We caught our breath and then began looking for a spot to put up our tent. Really, there wasn't a spot. At least, there wasn't a spot I liked. We eventually settled on a hillside location that definitely wasn't flat. We knew we'd be in for an interesting night's sleep, we just didn't know how interesting. Just getting into our sleeping bags, CC slid down to the downhill side of the tent. He had to try and army crawl to the uphill side. We had both not laughed so hard in ages. He ended up letting a bit of air out of his mattress which seemed to help a bit.

I always tell myself that I’ll never do this hike again. However, I know if a buddy called me up and wanted to go, in 0°F weather, during a snowstorm, I’d jump at the chance.