Vics Blog

The San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado are a photographer’s dream. Starting in mid July, you’ll find remote mountain valleys filled with the music of splashing, pristine creeks and waterfalls. Hillsides and meadows are sprinkled in all directions with a bounty of beautiful wildflowers including columbine and Indian paintbrush. Ghost towns like Animas Forks can be found on the numerous four wheel drive roads that crisscross the area and take you to lofty places with names like Yankee Boy Basin, Poughkeepsie Gulch and Corkscrew Pass. The high peaks always surround you and you’ll understand why they’ve been called the American Alps.
Around the first week of October, the purple mountain slopes are dusted in hues of green, copper and gold as the aspen and scrub oak blanket themselves in their fall colors. The highest peaks glow orange in the evening air as the sun sets and reflects on newly fallen snow. In the distance, you can usually hear a bull elk bugle or coyotes howl at the moon as it rises and casts its ghostly light. I’ve been able to get some great images on the Dallas Divide road between Telluride and Ouray in the final half hour of the day.
Last summer, my friends, Mark and Terry Weishaup, Wayne Morine, and I decided to take a quick trip over to Ouray and spend three days four wheeling and taking pictures. We spent nights in a campground at the edge of town and each morning got up two hours before sunup and rode four wheelers into the high basins. The first morning we traveled up to Yankee Boy Basin which is best known for its’ incredible carpets of flowers. The lighting was tough at best as early morning in the high country can present numerous difficulties for a photographer. You can really burn out the color of the sky when focusing on the foreground or get great skies and leave all the flowers in colorless dark shadows when focusing on the mountains and clouds. I tried various techniques and filters but in four hours of shooting came up with only a couple of decent shots.
We jumped back on the four wheelers and decided to trek up to some old abandoned mines that we’d seen on the top of a steep, very narrow road that took off at the bottom of the valley and rose some one thousand feet above Yankee Boy. About half way up, our vehicles were rocking on three wheels instead of four and being less than a foot from the edge of a precarious two hundred foot drop, Mark and Terry decided to back up and turn around. We motored on up for another hour, keeping gut checks to ourselves and getting some awe-inspiring pictures at the top. We knew we had to go back down, but I was comforted by the important fact that Wayne was driving and I got the safe seat on the inside of the road and away from the cliffs. Two more days of the same, sunup to sundown, and taking a thousand pictures or more, we had a great adventure and got the pictures to prove it.