Telluride Town and Box Canyon

Author's Comments

The first time I walked down Colorado Avenue I kept stopping in the middle of the street to look up, because the mountain walls do something to your sense of scale that takes a few minutes to absorb. The town sits at the closed end of the canyon, and on three sides the rock simply rises. Bridal Veil and Ingram fall in thin white lines from the headwall above. The Victorian storefronts hold the foreground. The peaks hold everything else. The classic photograph is the one looking east down Colorado Avenue with the canyon wall behind. It is a real photograph and I have made it more than once, but I have come to prefer the version made from the Jud Wiebe trail a few hundred feet above the town. From up there the geometry of the place becomes clear - the grid of the Victorian streets pressed against the curve of the canyon, the river threading through, the falls catching late light against the dark rock. Late September is when this view is at its strongest. The aspens on the lower slopes go gold, the air sharpens, and the light at the end of the day rakes across the headwall in a way that summer haze never quite allows. The free gondola is the other tool worth using. Ride it at golden hour on a clear evening and shoot from the windows on the Mountain Village side, where the whole valley opens beneath you. It is a moving platform and a dirty window, so expectations should be modest, but the perspective is one you cannot get any other way. Come for a few days. The light here changes quickly, and the canyon rewards patience more than it rewards a checklist.

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