Loveland Pass

Author's Comments

At nearly twelve thousand feet, you step out of the car and the air does what it always does up here. It thins. The light goes harder and cleaner than anything you find lower down, and the horizon in every direction is made of mountains. Loveland Pass is one of those places where the scale of the West stops being an idea and becomes something you have to physically adjust to. I come in late June for the cornices. The snow holds along the ridgeline well past when the valleys have gone green, and there is a window of maybe two weeks when you can photograph white curling formations against tundra already in bloom. The contrast is strange and wonderful. In September the light shifts again, the air dries further, and the distant peaks sharpen until they look almost cut from paper. Golden hour is the hour, but be honest about what golden hour means at this altitude. The sun drops behind a ridge and the temperature falls fifteen degrees in twenty minutes. Bring more layers than you think. Bring them in summer too. A word about afternoons. The monsoon builds fast here in July and August, and the ridgeline is exactly where you do not want to be when it does. I have watched a clear sky turn to lightning in under an hour. Shoot the morning, or wait until the storms have passed and come back for the last light. The pass rewards patience and punishes the impatient with weather you will remember. On clear nights the Milky Way arcs over the divide with almost no light pollution to interfere. That is its own pilgrimage and worth a separate trip.

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