Many Different Places

Sometimes the best image is never photographed, but only an image that remains in your memory. Maybe the moment happened too quickly to capture it or you were too busy living in that moment to think to pick up your camera, maybe it's a moment to keep private or maybe it's something so beautiful it can only be appreciated in person. Whichever the reason the image remains, just not in a tangible format.

The morning I left to drive away from my parents house that I grew up in and lived in for most of my life, held one such moment. Some of my favorite images are those that look through a rearview mirror. The rearview mirror photograph represents not only what you are leaving behind, but all those experiences that have added to your life and shaped a part of who you are. That morning I was tearful of what I was leaving behind and fearful of what may lay ahead in the unknown. As Jesse took the wheel and I sat in the passenger seat of my car in the driveway, I glanced behind me into my rearview mirror and saw my parents standing in front of the house waving goodbye, perfectly framed. It's an image in my mind that means more to me than any I've ever photographed and I haven't figured out how to describe it in words with enough detail to recreate it.

The rearview mirror image can hold a life's story, a day's journey, an unforgettable trip, a soul filling drive down an empty road with a song playing on your radio that brings long forgotten memories back into your head. The image will make you remember that moment, that feeling, that time your heart felt so empty it might stop beating or that time when your heart felt so full that it might burst. The past friday, after a long week of working and the start of a long commute home, the Denver city lights flickered against the brake lights of all the other commuters accompanying me. A steady routine that was interrupted when the sweet, mellow song of Fade Into Me by Mazzy Star floated onto the radio. For a few minutes I was elevated to a cloud, where my surroundings no longer bothered me. Music that can have that happy, calming effect can be rare. When I hear that song I'll remember the flickering lights of the city of Denver in the blackened night sky and thinking that the unknowns of the future will all work out in the end. This is where I'm supposed to be.

Jesse has taken me to many wild and unknown places here in CO that I never would've ventured to on my own. Places that require 4 wheel drive vehicles and scary, curving roads with drop offs I'd be too scared to drive on my own. Wilderness that requires bushwhacking. But there are other places we venture that are on a more well trodden path with frequent travelers and well defined trails. He has requested me not to mention the names of the lesser known areas to keep them wild. This isn't the reason for the lapse in recent posts, but rather it has been an adjustment to be able to find time to write with a new job and less time during the weekdays. So today in this rare free time that I've come across I've put together a conglomeration of some photos from this past season's adventures. One obvious setting is Rabbit Ear's Pass and some hiking along the Continental Divide Trail. Other places are randomly set and unnamed.

My first view of the quaking Aspens...

A view of Rabbit Ear's...

Happy Trails and more to come!