Alpine Visitor Center and Fall River Pass

Author's Comments

At 11,796 feet, the air does something to the light that I have never quite been able to explain. It is thinner, certainly, but it is also cleaner in a way that affects color. The blues go deeper. The shadows have edges. On a July morning at Fall River Pass, when the sun is still climbing and the tundra is just beginning to warm, the Never Summer range to the west holds a quality of clarity that lower elevations simply cannot produce. The trail behind the visitor center is short and it will still leave you breathless. Two hundred feet of climb at this altitude is not the same two hundred feet you know from sea level. Go slowly. Stop often. The reward at the top is a full circle of mountains, the Mummy Range to the north, the Never Summers across the valley, and ridgelines folding into the distance in every direction. The wildflowers are what surprised me the first time. They are tiny. Alpine forget-me-nots no bigger than a fingernail, sky pilot in clusters low to the ground, moss campion pressed flat against the stone. This is a landscape that asks you to photograph it twice, once wide for the panorama and once close for the miniature world at your feet. Both photographs are true. Be off the ridge by noon. The thunderstorms here are not a suggestion, they are a near-daily certainty in summer, and there is nothing between you and the sky. Come early. The crowds build through the morning and the light softens past its best by ten. This is one of the few places where altitude itself is the photograph.

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