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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.

So nice to get outside and play in the snow with my friends again the last couple days!

When I come home after spending time in other mountain ranges, my perception of Mount Sneffels and the Sneffels Range always shifts a bit depending on where I've just been. For a random example, after time spent in the Wasatch Range of Utah, the San Juans always look so high and burly to me when I first come back here. On the other hand, we recently returned from three months in the Alps of Tyrol, Austria and my initial impression was that the Sneffels Range looked kinda short and stubby!

That said, spending time in other mountain ranges also makes me appreciate the unique qualities of my home mountains. Mount Sneffels isn't a particularly big peak compared to many of the behemoths in the Alps, but yet it has a certain rugged charm to it, with its symmetrical profile and its many rocky ramparts and spires leading up to the summit. Yesterday morning as Sneffels emerged from a clearing snowstorm with clouds blowing over the face of the mountain, its ruggedness was accentuated and then it looked to me like a pretty big peak indeed!