Latest Photo Stream
This "Photo Stream" is a repository of miscellaneous latest photos mostly from around where I live in Ridgway at the foot of the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado.
Autumn Atmosphere
Sunset light paints the clouds over Mount Sneffels during a brief gap between autumn rain storms.
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.
Two Thirteen Fivers
Hiking up Telluride Peak (13,507 ft) with the Red Mountains in the background.
View of the Red Mountains with Mount Sneffels (14,156 ft) behind, as seen from summit of Tower Mountain (13,514 ft).
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.
Electrifying Evening
A massive lightning bolt snakes across the sky above the Sneffels Range, eventually striking the summit of Dallas Peak.
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!
Fun in the Sun
Sara and Miriam take the final steps over a snowy ridge line before a long ski descent on a gorgeous, calm, sunny Sunday in May. Mount Sneffels (14,150 ft.) towers behind to the right.
May Refresh
Skinning up into a powder filled basin in May.
Miriam leaves her squiggles below Mount Sneffels - May.
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!
Light Before the Storm
Sunset light illuminates Mount Sneffels as a spring storm rolls into Colorado in early May.
Smooth Spring
Dropping! Drew takes the plunge onto a powdery face with the Sneffels Range in the background.
Jason carves down a wide open snowy bowl in May.
The predominately unsettled, cloudy, and cool weather this last month has nicely preserved the snow up high in the mountains, and north facing slopes have had an exceptionally smooth and consistent surface lately. So despite the record-low snowpack this year, the spring skiing/snowboarding has been pretty darn good!
May Ski
Jason Weiss skis in front of Mount Sneffels in early May.
Jason Weiss skis with a panoramic view of the Sneffels Range in early May.
After the lowest winter of snowfall on record in Colorado (about 25% of average), the south facing slopes of the Sneffels Range have the least amount of snow I've ever seen in the springtime. But, the north facing slopes are still holding nice, smooth snow for the time being!
April Refresh
Vijay skis fresh powder in late April.
Chris and Bo charging down through the clouds.
Jason skis with a backdrop of Silverton Mountain.
Drew laying some fresh carves.
Drew rides a big wide open slope.
After the doom and gloom of the heatwaves and rapidly melting snowpack in March, April has thankfully been much wetter and cooler here in southwest Colorado with some refreshes of snow up high. From what I've seen there's actually more snow now at the end of April than there was at the beginning! Earlier this week a storm dumped a fresh foot of powder in the mountains and some friends and I took full advantage with two back to back days of triple-descent tours.
Snow up High
Jason Weiss skis down through a couloir at 13,000 feet in the western San Juan Mountains in April.
Skinning in April on a record-low snow year.
Yesterday I dusted off the cobwebs from my splitboard and went on my first ski tour of the year! Given the record-low snowfall in Colorado this season, I just haven't been motivated to go out into the backcountry before now; but with the early onset of spring and the quickly dwindling snowpack I figured I might as well go check it out before it's all gone. Jason and I were delighted to find excellent snow conditions up high above about 11,000 feet elevation; the challenge was getting up to it through several miles of mostly dirt trail down low.