Horsetooth Rock

Author's Comments

The tooth is visible from almost everywhere in Fort Collins, which is part of why the hike up to it feels less like discovery and more like keeping an appointment. You see the formation from the grocery store parking lot, from the highway, from your friend's backyard, and eventually you climb it because the mountain has been watching you for long enough. The trail does not hide its intentions. It climbs, and it keeps climbing, and the foothills open behind you in stages as you gain the seventeen hundred feet. In late September the grasses go pale gold and the scrub oak turns rust along the lower switchbacks. There is little shade. I have learned to start before the sun clears the ridge, partly for the heat and partly because the light on the reservoir below is at its best in the first hour, when the water is still holding the cooler tones of dawn and the plains beyond are flattening into blue distance. The rock itself is less photogenic up close than it is from a distance. This is worth knowing. The formation reads best as a silhouette on the skyline, which means the photograph you actually want may not be from the summit but from somewhere along the approach, where the tooth still has its shape against open sky. I have made my favorite frames here looking back rather than forward. Stay for golden hour if you can. The plains east of the foothills do something remarkable in the last half hour of light, going amber all the way to the horizon, and Fort Collins below begins to show its small grid of streetlights coming on one by one.

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