Grand Lake

Author's Comments

Grand Lake at six in the morning, mid-September, is one of the few places in Colorado where I have consistently made photographs I am happy with. The lake holds fog the way a bowl holds water. It does not drift across the surface so much as settle into it, thick and still, and on the right morning the tops of Mount Craig and Mount Baldy rise out of the mist like islands while the lake itself disappears entirely. The boardwalk in town is the easy answer and I will not pretend otherwise. It works. The compositions are there, the angles are clean, and the light comes up over the eastern peaks in a way that backlights the fog and turns it almost gold for about twenty minutes. After that the fog burns off and you have a different photograph, still good but more ordinary. What I have learned is to arrive earlier than makes sense. Five-thirty in mid-September, the air just below freezing, the town still asleep. The aspens on the surrounding slopes are usually just turning by then, and if you time it right you get the gold of the leaves above and the gold of the fog below and the dark wedge of the mountains between them. That is the photograph worth driving up for. Bring a longer lens than you think. The wide shot is obvious and most people make it. The frame I keep returning to is tighter, somewhere around 100mm, isolating a single ridge of aspen against the fog with the water barely suggested at the bottom edge. The lake does not need to be the whole picture. Sometimes it is enough that you can feel it there.

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