Trails and Tribulations
“East Inlet Meadow” Rocky Mountain National Park // Sept 23, 2022 // 6:37am
One of the biggest challenges of starting a landscape and nature photography business is actually finding, then creating the photographs. Seems pretty obvious huh? We started Hadley Images with a small collection of images we had acquired on trips to the mountains since we originally photographed “Sunset in the San Juans” in 2014.
This year, Chris and I have made three trips to Colorado. Our trips are usually for a week at a time. Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter. Besides looking for beautiful landscapes or cool interesting mountain images, we are also scouting areas in the state where we would love to live full time. So it’s a dual purpose trip for us. On the photography side, I always say that if we come back with six keeper photos on these short adventures, I’d consider it successful. If we found a place to live? Hallelujah!
So far in 2022, we visited Estes Park in March so we could explore and capture late winter photographs in Rocky Mountain National Park. In June we traveled further west to explore Ouray and Ridgway, before settling in Lake City for a few days to photograph in the San Juan Mountains. Finally in September, we traveled to Granby and Grand Lake to scout that area and also spend some time on the western side of RMNP.
To get those truly magical landscape shots that every photographer strives for, the first thing you need to know is exactly where they are. That’s pretty basic. However that also requires a lot of scouting and research. Sometimes, if you’re lucky you can access these locations by vehicle, but often times you cant. The second thing that needs to happen is capturing those images at the perfect moment. For sunrise and sunset shots the perfect blend of light and colors only happen for a few minutes in the morning or evening. And without a few clouds in the sky to reflect the sun as it rises and drops above or below the horizon, you really don’t always get those amazing colors. So you have to figure out your location, have a composition decided, your camera prepped, and wait and see what beauty appears. It’s not uncommon for landscape photographers to visit their favorite location multiple times to wait out that perfect light, that perfect shot.
For Chris and I, who are only in an area for a few days at a time, it makes those opportunities very challenging.
Fortunately, we love to hike. We research hiking trails and possible shooting locations for weeks before we hop in our truck and drive west across Kansas to our chosen destination. But we are not as young as we used to be. Or in my case, I’m not nearly in as good a shape as I would like. So we have to keep in mind the difficulty of trails as well as the altitude adjustment. We have to find hikes that we feel comfortable attempting very quickly into our trip.
In March, when we visited Estes Park and the eastern side of RMNP, hiking was not really much of an option. It was still winter there. That said, we were able to hike around a couple of frozen lakes, and get some really beautiful images of fresh snow on the trees and mountains. While in Lake City, we didn’t really have access to many trails so most of our keeper images were from locations we could access by vehicle. We found several really beautiful locations along and beyond Slumgullion Pass. We also learned that we really needed a Jeep if we wanted to gain access to a lot of the locations near Lake City, and the famed Alpine Loop.
Our September trip was different. There were many trails on the western side of RMNP, as well as in the Granby and Grand Lake area that we could access. Actually over the course of six days, we logged right around 20 miles on hiking trails. That said, I almost died a couple of times too. You really need to acclimate to the altitude before strapping a 15 pound backpack, loaded with a camera and lenses, on your back and hitting a trail.
One of our favorite images from the trip to Grand Lake is “East Inlet Meadow”, which is the cover to this blog. We first discovered the location of this photo while on our second hike of the week. It is located on the East Inlet Trail which is just east of Grand Lake. We first heard about this trail from our friend, and one of my old film producers in Kansas City, Chris Weaver. Chris and his wife Marsha owned property in Grand Lake, and I reached out to him for some ideas before we left Kansas. The East Inlet Trailhead is actually an official entrance to RMNP so it is monitored by Park Rangers, which is kinda weird for a trail. A note about RMNP in the summer and fall is you have to have a reservation to get access the park from 9am to 3pm. To avoid this little issue, we hit the trail around 8:30 am before it got too crazy.
The trail starts out nice and mellow. About a half mile in is Adams Falls, and it is also where 90% of the folks on this trail stop, visit, then turn around. We decided to continue on as far as we could. Around a mile and a quarter up the trail we came across the vista of this meadow. It was beautiful. We stopped and shot a couple of pics, but it was already around 9:30 am so the magic of the light was long gone. We wandered for a total of 2.5 miles up the trail before the elevation of the trail finally did me in. Silly flatlander. Chris could have ditched me then and gone much further, but fortunately she didn’t. We eventually worked our way back to the trailhead, once again stopping at another point along the meadow for a snack and a few pics. A five mile hike on day two was all I needed.
But it was day two and I had still not found a shot worth keeping. The wildflowers were long gone. The aspens were turning their brilliant yellow, but I never found a shot that stood out enough to make me stop and break out the camera. The western side of RMNP was recovering from the East Lonesome fire of 2020 that destroyed many of the trees in and around the park for miles. It was a surreal visual, but I couldn’t see anyone wanting to buy a fine art photo of a glade of burned, dead trees.
On day three we returned to Monarch Lake, a location that had an easy four mile hike around the lake that we used as our “starter hike” our first day. It was a rainy morning and I was hoping to capture some images of rain coming across the lake. It was almost deserted that morning, and we were able to capture a few really nice images while we were there. Woo hoo, we were on the board!!
When Chris and I got back to our condo we were making a plan for the rest of the week. I was still looking for that one shot, the one that rises above everything else on a trip. I kept going back to the snapshot of the meadow on the East Inlet Trail. It was such a classic mountain landscape, with the little creek snaking through the meadow. So beautiful. The shot faced due east which meant to get that magic shot I was talking about earlier, we would have to be there and set up before the sun rose over the mountains to the east. That would be around 6:30 am. That also meant we would have to hit the trail by 5:30 am. It would have to be our first ever pre dawn hike. So we decided what the heck, although it was a bit scary to be honest. We had a plan. We decided on Friday morning September 23 to go ahead and make the hike and really just hope for a beautiful sky.
We left our condo around 4:45 am and arrived at the trailhead around 5:20 am. There were three other cars in the parking area and we guessed they belonged to overnight backpackers or campers.
We (me to be precise) screwed around in the dark getting our packs together for around 20 minutes before hitting the trail around 5:40 am. There was no moon in the sky that morning so it was pitch black. We both had head lamps to guide us, but there is a very spooky, uncomfortable feeling of hitting a trail when it’s that dark. On our first hike there, we saw signs about bear sightings at one of the camping areas we needed to pass, plus the knowledge that mountain lions are still in the park, lets just say that our senses were very tuned in that morning. Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My.
But it was actually very fun.
Once you get past Adams Falls at the 1/2 mile mark, the trail is pretty flat as it tracked along the East Inlet creek, and like a lot of trails in RMNP, they were perfect trails. As we hiked, the sky started the slow, sure transition to its morning glow, and the sounds of rushing water in the creek to our right was a comforting sound even though we couldn’t really see it. Before we knew it we came upon the meadow and our location for the shoot.
We spent the next two hours at the location. I shot a little over 100 exposures as the sky slowly lightened. At first there were no clouds. But then they magically appeared. And suddenly the sun started to give them the rich orange color. This only lasted for about ten minutes, as I shot exposure after exposure.
As we captured images, a few other early bird hikers passed by with the very typical and very friendly exchanges we always seem to experience on Colorado trails. A couple from New York who had been traveling the USA for the past year stopped and chatted with us for a while. They had seen the colors of the sky when they started their hike, but were mostly hoping to see some Moose in the meadow. Unfortunately we never saw any Moose, and fortunately, no black bears.
It’s always great to come home with an image that you are genuinely excited about. To be honest we have a few more from this trip to share that we are really happy about as well, but we were especially happy with “East Inlet Meadow”. Completing the challenge of a pre dawn hike on a trail to get a beautiful landscape photograph, and being lucky enough to get it on one attempt is a truly rewarding experience.
But it also leaves us with the knowledge that to be able to do this consistently, we need to be somewhere in those mountains for longer than a week at a time. We’re working on it.
Finally, Chris and I made the hike back to the trail head and parking area, passing more morning hikers and even one young park ranger. We greeted them all with a good morning and a smile. We hopped in our trusty F-150 and drove into Grand Lake and had an amazing breakfast at The Sagebrush BBQ and Grill restaurant. It was probably 10 am and it had already been a perfect day in the mountains.
“The Boys of Winter” // Rocky Mountain National Park // March 04, 2022
“Sprague Lake in Winter” Rocky Mountain National Park // March 07, 2022
“Bristol Head Mountain” // San Juan Mountains // June 21, 2022
“Uncompahgre Peak at Sunset” // San Juan Mountains // June 23, 2022
Chris leading the way on a hike around Lily Lake in the winter. // Rocky Mountain National Park // March 2022
Behind the camera at East Inlet Meadow. The sky was still awesome, but the color was gone. // RMNP
Russ and Chris on a hike at Monarch Lake // Granby, CO