Typically June is hot and dry here in southwest Colorado, but in the last few weeks we've had quite a lot of strong rain storms, including an early onset of the monsoon pattern flowing up from Mexico. Daily thunderstorms and rain have been the norm lately! I'll take that any day over dry heat and hazy air.

In other news, a big house project has taken over my life this last month (thus my lack of new photos). Hopefully I can wrap this up in a couple weeks and get back up into the mountains!

This last Thursday I took Claudia to see her first concert at the famous Red Rocks Amphitheatre near Denver; we saw the second night of two sold-out shows of Lord Huron. If you're not familiar with Red Rocks, it's a spectacular concert venue built between two gigantic sandstone formations jutting out of a mountainside with a view overlooking Denver. The band was really great but the weather also put on an incredible show with a massive thunderstorm flashing nearly constant lightning out in the distance throughout the entire evening! Such an overwhelmingly impressive evening. The next morning we saw on the news that while we were enjoying the show at Red Rocks, that thunderstorm was hammering northeastern Denver with golfball-sized hail!

(Here's a good video I found on Instagram that shows the crazy lightning show from Red Rocks that night).

The snowpack in the San Juan Mountains is roughly 60% of average for this date and appears to be melting quickly in late May. The snow is also looking quite a bit worse for wear compared to last week, now that some buried dust layers have been revealed on the surface. Nevertheless there's still a lot of snow up high and definitely still some fun turns to be had!

Lots of dramatic skies lately around Ridgway and the northern San Juan Mountains!

I often shoot this same (or very similar) scene from my backyard, and it's always a pain to focus stack a bunch of photos to get the foreground sagebrush, pinyon pines, and background mountains all in focus, especially when it's windy and the trees are blowing around. For this reason, I often use a Pentax 75mm medium format lens with a Fotodiox tilt-shift adapter on my Sony camera. The lens tilt allows me to get sharp detail in both the foreground and background all in one shot, and as an added bonus the Pentax 75mm lens is one of the sharpest lenses in my entire collection!

Last night was an aurora for the masses, as the strongest geomagnetic storm in two decades filled the night skies with auroras far more south than normal (or north in the southern hemisphere). Here in southern Colorado we could only see a very faint reddish hue in the sky with our naked eyes, but the camera's more sensitive sensor revealed a bright magenta aurora over Ridgway and the Sneffels Range, casting a magenta glow over the snowy mountains! Since it's been rainy and snowy here lately, we were very lucky to have a window of clear skies during the strongest period of northern lights. This was quite a rare sight to see here in the San Juan Mountains!

Spring corn season is upon us in southwest Colorado as the high jeep roads are getting plowed out allowing easier access to higher peaks and steeper lines. On Friday some friends and I got windblasted as we rock-hopped our way up this fun little peak, but were rewarded with a nice soft descent back to the truck.