Summertime In Colorful Colorado
A summer trip to Colorado was just what was needed. Frankly, I think everyone should experience summer in Colorado. At least once. It’s as if God splashed the colors of the rainbow across the biggest mountains he could find, cranked the saturation up to 100, and proclaimed “let there be sunshine!” Ok, so that is a bit dramatic. But as you can see, Colorado is a photographer’s worst nightmare and also human’s best friend.
Green is well-known to be the hardest color to “get right” when processing an image. You know why this is? Humans can see more shades of green than any other color, which is thought to be due to evolution, where our ancestors needed to be able to differentiate between green foliage and also spot predators. So we can never get the hue of green “just right”. However, green also is known to evoke feelings of relaxation and harmony, making summer out here feel like a vacation times two.
Early summer in Colorado is wildflower season in the alpine. Lupine, Indian Paintbrush, Rocky Mountain Columbine, Badlands Mule-Ears, and Larkspur are just a few of the flowers that covered the mountains and meadows we traversed. Colorado is also home to intense sun, thanks to the high elevation we often found ourselves in. And also afternoon thunderstorms, which once they start, are fairly predictable that they’ll roll in around 2pm or so and be gone an hour later. Fortunately for us, storms in SW Colorado don’t typically start until the second half of July, leaving us with some nice cloud buildup but little else.
This was one of those rare trips that one of my friends was able to join. Dean met me out there for the first five days of the trip, and thanks to his adventurous spirit, we did a handful of activities I wouldn’t have taken on by myself. Outside of some pretty awesome hikes, we also rented mountain bikes for a morning, and an off-road jeep for a day, which allowed us to get to see some beautiful areas we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.
The only thing missing from this proper Colorado summer adventure was some time on the water, which can be fulfilled by some whitewater rafting or hitting the lakes or rivers for some floating and paddling time. If we had just one more day, it’s a pretty fair bet we would have been out on the water. But we’ll have to save that for next time.
