Palmer Park

Author's Comments

Garden of the Gods sits ten miles west and gets all the attention. Palmer Park sits inside the city, surrounded by neighborhoods, and almost no one outside Colorado Springs knows it is there. The sandstone is the same red. The ponderosas are older than they have any right to be in a city park. The view of Pikes Peak from the upper mesa, late in a September afternoon when the light has begun to warm and the mountain has gone purple at the base, is one of the quieter pleasures I have found in the front range. I tend to drive up to the mesa parking and then walk. The rock formations are scattered across the plateau in a way that feels accidental, and the trails connect them loosely enough that you can wander for an hour and still not have seen everything. The west edge gives you Pikes Peak framed by sandstone. The east edge gives you the plains running out toward Kansas, which is a different kind of photograph - flatter, longer, more about horizon than elevation. What I like about Palmer is that it asks nothing of you. There is no entrance gate, no shuttle bus, no crowd to work around at sunset. You can sit on a warm rock at golden hour with your camera in your lap and watch the light move across the city below, and the only company will probably be a few dog walkers heading back to their cars. The photographs you make here will not look like the famous ones from the famous park down the road. They will look like yours.

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