Mount Falcon Park

Author's Comments

The mesa earns its reputation by holding two horizons at once. Turn west and the Continental Divide stacks up in cold blue layers with Mount Evans anchoring the middle distance. Turn east and Denver spreads out across the plain, the skyline small and silver against an enormous sky. Most overlooks ask you to choose a direction. Mount Falcon does not. The castle ruins are what make this place photographically unusual. John Brisben Walker built a stone house up here at the turn of the last century and it burned in 1918, and what remains - the chimneys, the arched window frames, the foundation walls open to the weather - gives you a foreground that almost no other Front Range overlook can offer. I work them into the wider compositions when the light gets long. A stone arch with the Divide framed inside it is the photograph people remember. Golden hour is the answer in most seasons, but I have a particular fondness for the park in late winter, when there is still snow on the high peaks and the grasses up on the mesa have gone bleached and tawny. The contrast reads beautifully. Come up from the west trailhead if you want the ruins quickly. Take the east climb if you want to earn the Denver view, and time it so you arrive at the overlook with maybe forty minutes of sun left. The city goes gold before the mountains do, and there is a moment when both are lit and the air between them turns the color of weak tea. That is the photograph worth the drive from anywhere.

Gallery