Moraine Park

Author's Comments

There is a sound you hear at Moraine Park in late September that does not exist anywhere else in my year. It is the bugle of a bull elk carrying across a frozen meadow at six in the morning, thin and strange and old, and it stops you wherever you are standing. I have been coming here for a decade and I still do not quite believe it the first morning of every fall. The valley sits at eight thousand feet and holds cold air the way a bowl holds water. On clear October mornings the meadow fills with mist along the Big Thompson, and the elk move through it as silhouettes before the sun comes over the ridge. Longs Peak is to the south, already catching alpenglow while the valley floor is still blue. That is the moment. Maybe twenty minutes if you are lucky. The light comes down the mountain and crosses the meadow and lifts the mist all at once, and the herd is suddenly visible and luminous and you have one frame, maybe two, before it shifts. Bring the longest lens you own. Seventy five feet is the legal minimum from the elk and it is also the artistic one - the bulls are more themselves at distance, less aware of you, and the long glass compresses the meadow and the peak in a way that a wider lens cannot. Park at the pullouts before sunrise. Walk in quietly. Let the cold settle into your hands and wait. This is not a place you photograph quickly. It is a place you return to, fall after fall, and slowly learn.

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