Matthews/Winters Park

Author's Comments

The hogback runs north and south here like a tilted spine, and most people drive past it on their way to somewhere louder. Red Rocks proper is two miles south, drawing the crowds and the concert traffic, and Matthews/Winters sits in the quiet just north of all that with the same geology and almost none of the people. I came up first on a May evening when the grasslands were still that brief electric green they hold for a few weeks before the heat takes them. The sandstone goes a deeper red in the last hour of light, and the contrast between the warm rock and the cool grass is the kind of thing you cannot quite plan for. You just have to be there when it happens. The Red Rocks Trail will take you through the formations themselves, which photograph well in tight detail when the side light rakes across the bedding planes. But the better picture, I think, is the climb up to Dakota Ridge. From the spine of the hogback you can see Denver laid out across the plains to the east and the foothills folding back to the west, and at golden hour in autumn the whole arrangement turns into something almost geological in its layering. Light, then shadow, then light again. There are old foundations here too, what is left of Mount Vernon, a townsite from 1859 that did not survive. I find these quiet historical traces more affecting than the obvious monuments. A stone wall, a depression in the grass. The mountains have outlasted the ambition. That feels like the right note to end on, and the right reason to come.

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