North Table Mountain

Author's Comments

The climb up the southeast face is short and steep, and then the mesa flattens into something that feels like a different country altogether. Up top the wind is almost always moving. Golden sits below in its valley with the Coors Brewery anchoring the view, and beyond it the foothills rise in layered ridges toward the Continental Divide. I come for the late June evenings, when the wildflowers are still holding on and the light gets long across the basalt. The mesa was born from lava flows sixty-three million years ago, and you can feel that history in the rock underfoot - dark, broken, ancient in a way the surrounding sandstone is not. The southeast rim is where I usually end up. From there the town reads small and the foothills stack behind it, and at golden hour the whole composition warms in a way that makes the geology and the city feel like parts of the same picture rather than different ones. A wide lens does the work here, but I have made some of my favorite frames with a longer focal length pulled tight on the brewery and the ridges behind it. The full loop runs nearly eight miles around the rim, and most people do not walk it. Which means if you are willing to keep moving, you will find stretches of the mesa where there is nothing but wind and grass and the distant suggestion of the Front Range. That is the version of this place I keep coming back for.

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