Anatomy of a Composition - Sangre de Cristo's Myth

Sitting in a Ponderosa pine tree, staring south, journal in my hand, trying to explain to my brother just exactly what I was looking at; Pikes Peak to the east, a national forest to the north, the Continental Divide to the west, and the Sangre de Christos to the south. It was a sublime July evening, the soft light of dusk quickly rushing in, and the rich aromas of the tree warming themselves around me.

At 21, we just can’t really make any predictions. Twice that time and a decade later so much is different. I haven’t had the chance to explore that range like I’d written in that letter, but there has been a richness nonetheless. These mountains are in the southern park of Colorado, and they act as a bulwark to the Great Plains - physically and culturally. The Southern Ute made camps and track through here, the Spanish searched for El Dorado on the upper Rio Grande; it’s a vast landscape and it draws one in.

What can 31 years tell us? It offers experience and travel, careers and ego, relationship and loss; I grew, I saw, I stopped chasing my children and started chasing the light, but this place didn’t change.

Anatomy of a Composition - Sangre de Cristo's Myth - ISO 100 • F/4 • 1/2000 sec.