Wandering in Wildflowers
This week my wife and I ventured into the mountains near Silverton, Colorado for a wonderful 3-day trek through the wildflowers! We shuttled cars and did a one-way trailhead to trailhead walk - another variation of a trek that we've done two previous variations of, and we also included two exploratory side hikes each evening.
A trail meanders through vast fields of Indian Paintbrush wildflowers.
We walked for miles and miles along mountainsides bursting with vast fields of colorful flowers. The alpine meadows were celebrating the climax of summer and the vibe was: "Life is beautiful! Life is good!!!"
Snowdon Peak with the Grenadiers and Needle Mountains behind, as seen from a high tarn on a hazy July afternoon.
After setting up camp on the first day, we discovered an unlikely passage through a massive cliff band and scrambled up to a high tarn that I had scoped out on the map, which I hoped to photograph for sunset. The tarn proved to be too high (and the breeze too strong) for a decent reflection, but we still enjoyed the immense view from up there!
Engineer Mountain (12,927 ft.) towers above the surrounding landscape like a giant pyramid.
A second breathtakingly beautiful day of hiking through wildflowers brought us to another flower hotspot that I've photographed numerous times previously. Since I didn't feel the need to repeat my previous comps, we instead spent the evening exploring around, eventually arriving at a glorious patch of multi-colored flowers where we stopped to make some late coffee and wait for sunset.
Late evening sunshine illuminates a colorful array of wildflowers with Grizzly Peak (13,734 ft.) in the distance.
The atmosphere was pretty hazy these days from wildfire smoke that drifted all the way from California and Oregon, but when the sun dipped below the clouds I was thrilled to see how the light beamed through the haze, and once the evening sunlight hit the flowers I caught my favorite photo of the summer so far!
It's actually been quite some time since I've backpacked with Claudia, so that was super fun, and all in all this trip was a great reminder of how magical backpacking can be, especially at the height of summertime!
