The one that got away

Longs Peak Morning. RMNP, Colorado, 2012

We all know about the “golden hour”, that time near both sunrise and sunset when the light transforms the world and photography becomes a delicious delight (as in the above image, made just before dawn). We also likely know that the so-called “golden hour” can last anywhere from a fleeting few minutes or even seconds to two, three or more hours–it all depends on the atmospheric conditions, cloud cover, topography, subject matter, and so on.

Well, yesterday approaching the sunset hour, my wife and I had just passed through Moraine Park in Rocky Mountain National Park. There were some interesting stratus and lenticular clouds up high as well as some lower cumulus clouds obscuring a few of the more prominent peaks. The sun had dropped behind the lower clouds to the west of the Divide and the light was quite flat and boring. A herd of elk was grazing in the meadow, but with the flat light and the lack of bull elks doing their macho joisting we passed them up.

It was just a few minutes later, when we had left the Park and had parked in the town of Estes Park, that the sky exploded. The sun had dropped low enough to actually shine briefly underneath the low clouds, turning the cumulus into a line of fiery fleece. At about the same time, the higher clouds also began to turn crimson, red and yellow, bathing the entire world below in a glowing and powerful secondary, reflected light. It all lasted maybe ten minutes–and I have no photograph of it.

The thought had crossed my mind as we passed through Moraine Park that it might be a good idea to pull over and wait out the remaining few minutes before official sunset just to see what might happen. But I didn’t. Consequently, we simply watched this beautiful spectacle from between power lines and store fronts in downtown Estes Park, letting the image of it write to our moist cerebral memory buckets rather than our electronic SanDisk cards.

Ah, the one that got away!

The lesson? Wait it out! Don’t give up on the light until you are sure it is dead and gone!