Ptarmigan Peak Trail Overlook

Author's Comments

Nine miles and twenty-six hundred feet of climbing is the price of admission, and I will tell you plainly that it is a fair trade. The trail starts in spruce so old and dense that the first hour passes in a kind of green dusk, the kind of forest where the light arrives in shafts and the temperature stays a few degrees cooler than it should. Then the trees thin, and thin again, and suddenly you are above them entirely. This is what I came for. The tundra in July goes soft with alpine flowers so small you have to kneel to see them properly, and the wind up here has a different sound than the wind anywhere else. From the ridge near the summit, Dillon Reservoir sits below like a piece of cut glass, and the Gore Range lifts up across the valley in a wall of serrated peaks that still hold snow into August. The Tenmile Range is to the south. You can stand in one place and turn slowly and not know where to point the camera first. Start in the dark. I mean it. Headlamp on, leave the trailhead by four in the morning in midsummer, and you will be above treeline for the first real light. The air at twelve thousand feet does something to the color of dawn that I have never quite been able to describe in writing - it goes thinner and cleaner, and the shadows on the far ranges read sharper than they have any right to. The mountain goats are often out then too, moving along the ridges like they belong there, which they do. Be down by noon. The afternoon storms here are not a suggestion.

Gallery