Pre-dawn, October 14, 2012. Sugarloaf Mnt., Colorado
This morning, the 19,494th day of my life, I got myself out of bed in the dark, dressed, and headed up to one of my favorite perches for some panoramic landscape shots at sunrise–Sugarloaf Mountain. At 8,917′ of elevation, it is a molehill situated like an island in the foothills of the Rockies about midway between the Continental Divide and the Great Plains and I can get to the top from downtown Boulder in less than an hour (25-minute drive, 20-minute hike). The views from the summit are usually wonderful and the weather forecast told me there was the possibility of some clouds and it had reportedly even snowed a bit in the high country–hmmm, the makings of a nice landscape image!
However, it turned out to be just an average Colorado sunrise–maybe a 5 or 6 on the 10-point scale. Relative to other places I have lived that is actually pretty good, and if you live in, say, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, maybe you would have been impressed this morning, but it wasn’t quite special enough for me to be inspired to fill my camera’s memory card.
But sometimes it’s not all about the image.
How many sunrises have I seen out of the nearly 20,000 days I have been on this Earth? Maybe 1,000? 2,000? More? Probably more than the average bear as, throughout my life, I have often been up at the dawn hour. How many have you seen? And how many have you and I taken for granted? It is really quite grand when you think about it–the Earth spinning its way toward the east at roughly 1,000 miles per hour (depending on your latitude) and every 24 hours or so, this great plasmic, nuclear meatball of writhing hydrogen comes climbing up over the eastern horizon to greet us.
The Navajos build their hogans (and now their more conventional homes) with the entrance facing the rising sun–it has that much spiritual significant to them. Most of us who live “modern” lives don’t think much about the natural world these days and we usually miss the sunrise event due to other “modern priorities.” Me? Well, I think we have forgotten our priorities.
So, going up to Sugarloaf today turned out to be more than simply carrying with me the hope of capturing an unusual sunrise landscape image with spectactular light; it was also about just being there for a great event…listening to the silence, the sound of a bird flitting around in a bush…watching the clearing storm clouds dissipate over the Plains…being alone with my thoughts…admiring the twisted and burned snags from a past wildfire…smelling the clean high country air. Sometimes it’s just good to witness these things and spend some time in contemplation mode, regardless of whether the electronic memory card gets used or not. Sometimes the most wonderful moments of photography happen when you are not doing photography.
Sunrise. From Sugarloaf Mountain, Colorado, October 14, 2012
You might also like
Leave a reply