Back to Telluride

Having given up on making it around the ridge because of the "road conditions" on Last Dollar Rd, I turned around and headed back to Telluride, or at least to the Telluride highway. From a photographer's point of view, there's a lot to be said for retracing your footsteps - or your tire tracks in this case. You drive till something catches your attention and you can find a place to pull over. You get out, shoot whatever it was that caught your eye then, if you're smart, you look all around for anything else of interest - click, click, click. But you still miss an awful lot, surveying only what's in front of you during the time you're driving. By going back the way you came, you get another chance at all that real estate. . .

I'm not quite sure what it is about the picture above - maybe the orange stakes - but I like it.

Recognize these mountains? Yeah, me too. But I missed this composition the first time, probably thinking about the barns I'd just passed. So, I stopped on the way back for the next picture, and found this nice, suitably rustic fence AND a bale of barbed wire.

Here's one of the barns I mentioned - the others are up the slope a little bit. But I was thinking about a composition for a painting, and wanted to get close enough for some detail. What do you think, Stephen?

Alright. Back out to the highway; down the road several miles alongside the San Miguel River and hook a right on Colorado Hwy 62 out of the valley - or at least out of this valley.

This is a view looking east on the road to Ridgeway. Coincidentally, it was taken from the intersection of Last Dollar Rd and CO 62 - where I would have joined the highway if Last Dollar had been passable. The sky kept getting more and more interesting throughout the afternoon.

This was taken at the same stop, but looks southeast. Nice scenery, a good sky - it gave me a sense of the winds aloft and reminded me for awhile how much fun flying used to be. I never flew up here, but I'll bet it would have been great.

End of the Road

So, I'm still kicking up dust on Last Dollar Rd, looking for new vistas and working my way around the western shoulder of the mountain headed for Montrose. The mountain backdrop here is the same as in the picture of the chalets west of Telluride, a southerly view, but the foreground and middle ground have changed. The scene could use some horses - or maybe some Longhorns - couldn't it?

Okay, here's another one with all the elements: the mountain at first glance appears to be a perfect cone; the snowcap is a nice touch; a traditional snake-rail fence just past the whatchamacallit trees; and the stand of aspens split by the road would give you some shelter from the wind. You could get excited about going home if you lived on Last Dollar Rd.

This, of course, is the same stand of aspens from the preceding picture. Here though, it's all about the light. It would even be nice to walk down this road. . .

I saw this fence and disliked it immediately. First of all, the rails aren't split - like they ought to be in my estimation - but it's more than that. After some consideration, I decided the posts ought to be vertical, irrespective of the slope at the side of the road. These posts appear to be perpendicular to the ground. What was that guy thinking? Not only does it offend my aesthetic sense but, commenting as an engineer, a significant portion of the weight of the fence is "working" to loosen the posts in the ground. But it's not my fence. . .

After a few bends in the road, you begin to anticipate what might lie beyond the next one. In this case, I was wondering when the road was going to start around the western end of the ridge and take me out of the San Miguel or Telluride Valley [I don't know what the locals call it]. As it turned out, just around this bend I found one more gravel drive before Last Dollar Rd turned into a tire-sucking quagmire, challenging all comers. Needless to say, I declined the challenge.

Last Dollar Road

If you'll remember, I told you I discovered Last Dollar Road on Google Earth, where someone had posted (and labled) a couple of very nice pictures which gave me the notion that I'd like to see what I could find up there. So, after cruising Main Street, I took the Airport Road up onto the mountain and found Last Dollar Rd just where it was supposed to be. Little traffic and lovely views.

If you look closely at the first three pictures, you'll see they were all taken of the same ridge and from the same general direction - if not the same spot in the road. Picture No.1 was taken looking north, along a fenceline toward a pair of pleasantly imposing tors with lines of aspens running down the slope in front. The fenceline and the lines of trees move your attention across the lower half of the picture in contrast to the mutually reinforcing masses of the two mountains.

In picture No. 2 the viewpoint has shifted around to the left as I moved farther along Last Dollar Rd. Note the two peaks from the previous picture are no longer perfectly aligned and neighboring peaks now share the spotlight. Note also that the sky has become more interesting as the afternoon clouds continue to increase. The fenceline might have been added simply for visual interest, considering the break with no gate and the fact that it seems to just stop 200 ft down the road [actually, it continues on, but curves back to the right, hidden by the slope]. In any case, it works fine for my purposes.

No. 3 was taken from the same location; I just shifted the focus to the right slightly. The clouds here are closer and somewhat more substantial than in the previous shots, giving me hope that before the day is out I'd have some much more interesting skies. I knew from an earlier trip that once I get out to Utah [the following day], where the scenery is monumental but visual detail is often baked out of pictures by an unrelenting sun, I was likely to need some interesting skies to help out my "rock shots".

Well, it's May so the snow is melting and, though the rivers were all running high, I didn't see as many streams washing down off the mountain as I had expected. Here's a nice, full, noisy one coming down, running under Last Dollar Rd and making its way south to join the San Miguel.

Telluride At Last! Sorta. . .

Finally made it to Telluride! Well, almost. This first shot is looking east from CO 145, looking up the valley towards the town, a mile or two up the road and hidden at the base of the mountains. Long and narrow, like the valley itself, the town's about ten streets wide and about three times longer, and bounded on its southern edge by the San Miguel River.

The town reminded me of Mainstreet, USA at Disneyland, as much as anything. Neat, clean, well kept. If I were a shopper, it's the kind of place I wouldn't mind spending the day wandering in and out of stores. It was, in a word, inviting.

Another shot, a hundred feet or so up the road from the previous one. This one highlights the San Miguel River, meandering back and forth across the valley floor. You'll find out sooner or later, so I may as well confess. . . after all the build-up, I didn't get any shots of the town itself. On my sole trip up and back down Main Street, I was keeping a lookout for pedestrians, which seemed prudent in light of their number, and avoiding the large volume of vehicular traffic, which moved slowly but steadily through town.

Here, you can see the western edge of town as I approached. Alongside the rode, hidden by those bushes at the center of the picture, was the local sherrif in his Jeep, whose presence there slowed the incoming traffic right down. Very effective. Like I said in the first of these posts, I'd give the town of Telluride an "A" or even "A+".

This one was taken looking south from Airport Road and shows a few of the chalets and such for the skiing public. I must admit, I didn't see anything like the ski runs I saw years ago in Red River, NM. But I trust they're around somewhere; this place is way too cool to be a hoax.

Almost There!

It's hard sometimes to specify just what it is that makes you pick out one picture over another, and if I had to limit the pictures I present in my blog I might well feel it's not worth it. Luckily, with the advent of digital photography, ever-larger compact flash memory devices, and online storage and archives for your blog, you can tell yourself there's no reason for you to make those hard decisions. Though I can't say exactly what it is about the picture above that turned the trick, it's enough to say that it made the cut.

First of all, note the half moon near the top of the picture. It seems awfully small. Perhaps the atmosphere at this altitude doesn't magnify it as much as at lower levels. . . any comments?

One overall impression I have from my travels hither and yon is a marked difference between the Rockies and the Smokies (or Appalacians, if you prefer). I suppose it all has to do with altitude but, back east we see rock faces where engineers have carved roads out of the wilderness - and occasionally a monolith like Stone Mountain or Looking Glass Mountain. Out here, you have the roadside rock faces as well and, of course, the mountain tops regularly seem to be poking out of their skins. But elsewhere there seems to be just a lot of exposed rock that, had it been in the carolinas, would probably be covered with grass - or at the very least, moss. It's not a complaint, just an observation. I guess that's why they're called the Rockies. I'm not sure just where I'd put the Sierra Nevada; but it didn't give me the same impression.

Just look at all that bare rock! It's as though Colorado's got more mountains than it can properly cover...

 

But it certainly knows how to do a vista in fine style when it wants to.

Approaching Telluride

We're up higher now. I can tell because the whole world seems to have "opened up". The highway is wandering about a little more now, through snowfields bounded by fir forests at the base of the mountainsides. Oh! And then there's the hypoxia. . .

 Here's another place I could use that geologist. I'd love to know how that came about.

Along both sides of the highway there are steel stakes, 8 or 10 feet high, about every 50' to mark the highway for the snowplows. On this trip, however, the highways were clear and dry and the stakes at the side of the road poked through only one or two inches of snow - not much call for them. Except for one. I drove by it before I noticed a large hawk perched there, looking for voles or field mice, I guess - or just hangin', enjoying the bright clear morning. I shifted my eyes to the rear view mirror and he was still there. Would he stay? I turned around and drove back past him and pulled off the road. I got out with my camera, surprised he was still there, then - after looking both ways - crossed the highway to mosey a little closer. . . and he was gone. RATS! So I took the picture above. It's better than nothing.

This one's kinda like an earlier one, taking the picture normal to the ridge line. Not my preferred angle on the subject, but. . .        Anyway, what does it for me here is the fir trees, specifically the play of the sunlight from behind, highlighting each individual tree.

The angle here is more to my liking, but I'm getting impatient. ARE WE THERE YET?