At the end of September, I decided to make a trip to Colorado since the Aspens were approaching peak foliage in the upper elevations. It was well worth the trip to this very beautiful part of the country.

My destination was Lake City, which is in the south central portion of Colorado and on the continental divide line. This area also has some of the highest altitudes in Colorado.

Unfortunately the day after we arrived, the weather turned for the worse and they experienced very high winds in upwards of 50-60 mph. This pretty much knocked all the leaves off the trees, but at least I had one good day of shooting in before this happened. After the storm, I had to find other things to shoot than just color. In this beautiful area, that didn't turn out to be a problem.

One of my favorite drives is the Alpine Loop outside of Lake City. This takes you across Engineers Pass and back through the Cinnamon Pass, and the Cinnamon Mountains in the San Juan Mountain Range. These are mountains that have an interesting reddish-brown tint to them, giving them their name. I took this route at least 3 times and the majority of my recent Colorado pictures are from that route.

The first day was cloudy with fairly heavy overcast. This is good for shooting fall color although not too ideal since it was also quite dark. At one point when photographing a stream, it started snowing heavily. I took this opportunity to grab a few shots during the snow but I had to bump up the ISO to at least 640 to get enough shutter speed to capture the snow in mid air. Otherwise with a slower speed, it would have looked more like fog, and I wanted to see the big flakes showing up.

While it was still snowing, I went a little further up the trail to an old building that had a bit of interesting light coming from behind it. I made a series of shots without a tripod trying to capture the moment before it passed. I was a little nervous about getting the camera wet as it was snowing hard but managed the shots.

On the final day of shooting, I went up the mountain on a road called Carson Road. This is a steep winding road that goes from one valley to another, over a mountain pass. The road dead-ended some 4 miles or so into the second valley with a beautiful vista. I would probably estimate the altitude to be around 11,000 feet or so as we were above the tree line. At the end of this muddy and jagged-rock road, I discovered I now had a flat tire on the front of the truck. The rocks had sliced the side wall of my off-road mud tire rendering it useless and unfixable. It’s amazing how sharp and jagged these rocks are. I caution anyone venturing on deep off-road trails up there to ensure that you are carrying a well prepared spare tire.

After changing my tire, I made my way back to Lake City. Nobody in town had a replacement tire that was even close to the 315/75R16 tires that I had, (these are about 35” tall and 12.5” wide) so I had to drive the 55 miles to Gunnison to get a replacement. This pretty much took an entire day so I lost one full day of shooting due to this problem. We were due to return to Tulsa early the following morning.

Lake City, Colorado is one of my favorite places to visit. It is deep in some of the more mountainous areas of Colorado. The mountains around Lake City are in excess of 14,300. Uncompahgre Peak being 14,309 feet in elevation. It is a beautiful and rocky area that lies along the Continental Divide, and a place I highly recommend.

Full Colorado trip Gallery can be found by clicking HERE.

For more information on the Mountains of Colorado, I highly recommend The Colorado Fourteeners website for a lot of useful and detailed information.