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Although it's still early season and the snowpack still isn't really that deep, the recent moisture-laden storms really plastered everything nicely in the high peaks of southwest Colorado! Jason and I headed into the mountains again yesterday and found a big open face to carve our squiggles into.

The relentless rainstorms of October led to historic flooding in Durango and Pagosa Springs, but on the bright side, up high in the mountains it dumped several feet of powder! Yesterday was the first bluebird day after the storm, and I joined Miriam and Jason for my first day on the splitboard of the season. Oh how I love winter!!! It felt great to be out in the snow and carving turns again. If these El Niño fueled storms keep rolling through the southwest this winter, it could be a stellar season.

After our exciting day on the Ashley Gorge via ferrata, Tom and Drew and I embarked on a more mellow outing with an overnight backpack trip near Ruple Point in Dinosaur National Monument. My hopes for photographing a sunset here seemed to be quashed by thick clouds on the western horizon, but luckily the clouds thinned out just in time for the sun to dip into a clear gap, illuminating the scene with golden light.

After our time at Rattlesnake Arches, we drove south of Grand Junction to see Big Dominguez Canyon, another "local" canyon which surprisingly I've never visited before, despite having driven past it countless times! After a night camping on a nearby rim overlooking the canyon, we did a very pleasant day hike into the canyon, enjoying the sandstone scenery, ancient petroglyphs, and small waterfalls.

For months we've been looking forward to a 10-day road trip in southern Utah in mid-October. But as luck would have it, our timing coincided with torrential rain as tropical storms barreled over the Southwest. We waited a few days but by the time the weather cleared we didn't have that much time left to drive all the way out there. So instead we decided to stay closer to home and explore some new (to us) canyons near Grand Junction in Colorado. 

Our first stop was Rattlesnake Arches. Situated above the town of Fruita, just north of Colorado National Monument, Rattlesnake Arches are known for having the highest concentration of arches outside of Arches National Park in Utah. We spent a couple nights camping in our truck near the trailhead and hiking the trails around the fantastic arches.

Autumn has arrived in southwest Colorado. While most of the aspens haven't turned yellow quite yet around Ridgway, the air is getting chillier and the mountains even got their first [slight] dustings of snow (if you look closely you can see bits of white on the peak in the photo above). It's been nearly constantly cloudy and often rainy weather this whole month, with many colorful sunsets (and maybe sunrises too but I've been asleep for those). A couple nights ago I enjoyed a particularly dramatic sunset as the clouds briefly swept off the peaks between rain storms.

One of the perks of traveling is the fresh perspective you get when you come back home. Such was the case when we returned home to the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado after our two month road trip in the Pacific Northwest. After spending two months camping and hiking in the dense, dark forests of the PNW, I was positively ecstatic on our first hike back home – awed by the immediate broad vistas above treeline and the wide open tundra slopes. The sense of sheer altitude and space was palpable!

We've done a couple big day hikes up 13,500-foot mountains in the last month – first up Telluride Peak near Red Mountain Pass, and more recently up Tower Mountain near Silverton. A funny thing happened on Tower Mountain... as we neared the summit we saw two other hikers gaining from behind us, only to realize that it was our friends Miriam and Martin!!! What a random place to run into some Ridgway friends! They had hiked up from the other side of the mountain, so we ended up hiking down with them and then catching a ride with them back to our car, for an impromptu one-way shuttle hike!

The two photos above are actually looking at each other – Tower Mountain is visible in the photo from Telluride Peak (about 3/4 of the way to the right side of the horizon) and Telluride Peak is visible on the left side of the photo from Tower Mountain. In between are the aptly-named Red Mountains.

During this month of August the monsoon has been in active in southwest Colorado, with frequent afternoon thunderstorms and lots of cloudy skies and colorful sunsets. This is the cinematic summer weather I love the most!

Last night around sunset as a dark thunderstorm rolled in along the Sneffels Range, I was fiddling around with my new Sony A7R VI camera which just arrived in the mail that day. One big reason I bought the camera was for its "pre-capture" feature, which will continuously record a buffer of images at a high frame rate, and when you hit the shutter button it will save the previous ~1 second of images. This, theoretically, would allow me to capture lightning bolts without having to use a fiddly lightning trigger. Well, I was pretty excited to be able to test it out right away, and it works like a charm!

I just aimed the camera, half-pressed the shutter, and whenever I saw a bolt I hit the shutter and at 15-30 shots per second (over the previous 1 second) it captures the arc of the lightning over about 5-6 frames, allowing me to pick out the best moment. Easy peasy.

Perhaps this is a good omen for this camera that I caught a cool photo the very first time I used it!

We just got a blank new canvas to paint our carves on after 8 inches of May powder. Fresh snow under a hot May sun meant unstoppable globbing which felt like hauling bricks on our feet on the way up, but it was all worth it for the dreamy descents!