Mountain photos and adventure journals from Colorado.
This weekend I went on an overnight backpacking trip to Ice Lakes Basin, in the San Juans of Colorado, along with fellow photographer Aleks Kozakowski and about 200-300 other hikers. I’ve never seen so many people in the San Juans! I guess this is the “go to” place around here now. Anyhow, no problem, the basin is big enough for everyone. The wildflowers were great, and the clouds kept rolling through offering nice lighting conditions most of the time.
I just “found” this photo from back in July 2006, when some friends and I hiked a circumnavigational route around Wetterhorn Peak, a 14er in the Uncompahgre Wilderness of the San Juans in southwest Colorado. For a portion of this day, smoke from a nearby forest fire filled the high alpine basin, obscuring the view of Wetterhorn in a blue haze.
Last week I went on a five day backpacking loop hike in a remote area of the Weminuche Wilderness. Some highlights of the trip: hiking up an unknown knife-ridge in the pre-dawn darkness, enduring a lightning storm from a dubious treeline campsite near Rock Lake, being frightened by a possible (probably not) bigfoot footprint in the mud, seeing a group of horse riders dressed in full retro Daniel-Boone-style gear with muskets, and generally getting used to the monkishness of solo backpacking again.
Happy 4th of July from Ouray, Colorado!
An awesome sunset and rainbow over Ridgway, Colorado last night.
This morning Parker, Lily, and I went for a hike up into Weehawken Basin, out of Ouray, Colorado. It felt great to get up into the lush, green, forested mountains of the San Juans again. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there may be bigger, taller, and more impressive mountains than in Colorado, but nowhere do I know of a paradise like here! In a couple weeks I’d imagine that this scene will be plump full of wildflowers.
Upon reaching the gorgeous Weehawken basin, we felt energized and ready for more hiking, so we decided to go ahead and climb a peak. We headed up the tundra grass towards Mt. Ridgway.
Lily scouts the view, with Potosi Peak (13,786 ft.) behind. By the way, that big couloir on Potosi is #1 on my snowboard descent wish list.
Lily stands on the summit of Mt. Ridgway (13,468 ft.)
There was a plethora of these purple wildflowers on the rocky summit.
It’s good to be back home finally.
I made a quick trip out to San Diego this weekend for an old buddy’s wedding. Being springtime there, everything was green and vibrant and flowering, and my last day there was a gorgeous crystal clear day that made my heart ache for my hometown. I don’t have any photos to show for it, except this snapshot of Mission Beach and Mission Bay from the airplane window.
The weather in Colorado, on the other hand, was up to its usual antics. After being held in a holding pattern over the Front Range for a half hour, we finally started our descent into Denver right under the roof of a dark, ominous thunderhead. As we approached the airport the plane was getting tossed around so badly that the pilot gunned it out of there and we flew another holding pattern for about an hour, circling around the thunderhead and watching the purple lightning bolts flashing through the cloud and zapping the runway. No bueno. My photos unfortunately do not do justice to the scene, but regardless, this is something you normally don’t want to be seeing out of an airplane window.
The thunderhead finally moved away from the runway just far enough for the pilot to make a successful landing, but once we were safely on the runway the entire airport spontaneously combusted into flames – or was that just the trippy refractions of light in raindrops? Perhaps the latter. We then had to wait for another half hour on the runway since the entire ground crew staff had been ordered inside due to the lightning danger, and when we finally got into the airport it was a frantic mess of delayed flights and people running for their connections. Good fun!
I finally made it back to the Montrose airport at 1:30am, only to be almost immediately pulled over and ticketed for doing 50 in a 30 mph zone. Sweet! I swear it was 45 in a 35, but what can you do?
And next on tap: a roadtrip to the Northwest tomorrow for 10 days to hopefully snowboard down some volcanos! My recent life philosophy in tough economic times: when work is slow, play fast! (But don’t drive too fast!) I have a laptop now so perhaps I’ll post some pics during the trip.
In other news, I just realized (after two months) that in addition to the article that Cowboys & Indians magazine published about me and my photography in their March 2010 issue, they also published a web-exclusive interview on their website. Check it out: Jack Brauer: behind the lens.
Kismet from Mt. Sneffels’ Lavendar Col.
Sneffels summit view, May 2010. Had a nice snowboard ride down on firm but smooth snow, through a long curvy couloir off the south side.
I just dug this photo from the dusty depths of my hard drive. I took this sunset shot of Snow Peak (13,024 ft.) way back in March 2004. I was living in Denver at the time, and took advantage of an unseasonably warm spell in March to go winter camping up on this high ridge in the Gore Range, just east of Vail.
One of the great things about the Gore Range is that on the west side of the range there are numerous high points and ridges that are relatively safely accessible in the winter, offering awesome panoramic views of the main spine of the range. Better yet, the west side of the range gets great sunset alpenglow light since there are no large ranges directly to the west. From a photography point of view, sunset shooting is always a bit easier since you don’t have to wake up early, and you can spend the afternoon casually scoping out photo possibilities. On this evening, I had a really fun photo shoot; there were so many photo possibilities in every direction, and the wind-sculpted sastrugi snow formations on the ridge provided lots of interesting foreground possibilities. You can see some more photos from this evening here, here, and here.
An early morning photo of Abrams Mountain and Ouray taken during my trip there last week. The next morning I slept in and unfortunately a friend informed me that I had missed an incredible sunrise… d’oh! Such are the disappointments of a lazy photographer.
