Boreas Pass Road

Author's Comments

The third week of September is when this road becomes itself. I have driven it in July when the high meadows were green and the views ran clean to the Tenmile Range, and that is a fine drive, but it is not the photograph. The photograph is the aspens. They start lower on the mountain and work their way up, and there is a window of maybe ten days when the groves above Breckenridge go fully gold and the bristlecones hold their dark green against them and the contrast does most of the work for you. Go up at first light. The road climbs slowly along the old railroad grade, which means the gradient is gentle and the pullouts are frequent, and the morning sun comes across the aspens from the east in a way that lights them from behind. Backlit gold against shadowed trunks. That is the wide shot. The detail shot is closer in, a single grove where the leaves are turning at different rates and the color runs from green through yellow to something almost orange in the same frame. The Section House at the summit is worth the full drive. Eleven thousand four hundred feet, the Continental Divide, and a small red building that has been there in some form since the narrow-gauge ran through. It anchors a landscape that otherwise has no obvious foreground. South Park opens to the southeast and the Tenmile Range rises to the north and the building sits between them like a held breath. Most cars can make the road in dry conditions. Go on a weekday if you can. The light is the thing.

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