Ophir Pass

Author's Comments

Most people choose Black Bear or Imogene and never think about Ophir, which is exactly why I keep going back. The Silverton approach is the one to take. The grade is gentler and the views begin almost immediately, the Red Mountain peaks staining the morning in rust and ochre, the old mining bones of the district scattered across the slopes like something the mountains forgot to bury. The road climbs through spruce and then past it, and somewhere around eleven thousand feet the world opens. Tundra in every direction. In late July the wildflowers come in patches rather than carpets up here, paintbrush and alpine avens tucked into the rock, and the wind carries that particular high-country silence that is not really silence at all but the absence of everything you are used to hearing. I shoot this pass three ways. Wide, for the scale of the basin and the way the light moves across it. Landscape compositions that use the road itself as a line leading the eye toward Telluride's peaks on the far side. And detail work in the tundra, where a square foot of ground at this elevation contains more than most meadows do at half the height. Go early. The afternoon storms build fast in the San Juans in summer and you do not want to be above timberline when they arrive. A high-clearance vehicle is not optional. The window is short, late June through early October if the snow cooperates, and the pass feels genuinely remote in a way that most Colorado passes no longer do. That is the gift of it. Almost nobody comes.

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