Mount Sanitas

Author's Comments

Sanitas is the rare summit that hands you everything at once. East to the plains, west to the Indian Peaks, south to the Flatirons standing on edge like tilted pages, and Boulder spread below in a grid that softens the longer you look. The trail does not waste your time getting there. Forty-five minutes of steep, rocky work and you are standing on quartzite boulders that catch first light before the city does. I climb in the dark. That is the trick. The summit at sunrise in late September, when the air has gone clean and the Flatirons take on their morning red before anything else has color, is one of the better hours I know in this part of Colorado. The boulders at the top are not incidental. They are the foreground - rough, pale, geometric - and they give a wide lens something to hold onto while the range opens behind them. In winter the trail ices over in patches and most people stay home, which is reason enough to bring traction and go. The light in January is harder and longer, and the plains east of town go gold in a way they never quite manage in summer. I have made portraits up there with the Indian Peaks behind a person's shoulder and the wind doing what wind does at seven thousand feet, and those frames hold up. Come early. Come with layers. Stay through the moment when the light shifts from pink to ordinary daylight, because that shift is the photograph.

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