Dallas Divide

Author's Comments

The last week of September, sometimes the first days of October, this stretch of Highway 62 becomes one of the most photographed pieces of road in the American West. There is a reason. The Wilson Range stands far enough away to read as pure silhouette in the right light, and between you and those peaks the land does something generous - it rolls, it drops into meadow, it lifts into aspen groves that go fully incandescent for about ten days a year. The rail fences are the detail that makes it Colorado rather than anywhere else. I will be honest about the crowds. By five in the morning during peak color the pullouts are full, tripods shoulder to shoulder, and the sound of shutters at first light is almost comic. If that is not the experience you came for, there are quieter compositions a half mile in either direction from the most famous pullout, and almost no one walks them. The light hits the peaks before it hits the meadow, so the first ten minutes after sunrise are a study in layered illumination - cold foreground, warm summit, the gold coming down the slope toward you in slow motion. Summer has its own argument here, less celebrated and less crowded. The grasses go silver in late afternoon wind, the peaks still hold snow in their north-facing couloirs, and the rail fences cast longer shadows than you would expect. It is a different photograph entirely. Worth making.

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