Schism

We’d been up since half past one that morning. The plan was Maroon Bells at sunrise, which meant an overnight drive from Crested Butte to Aspen and the earliest start I’ve ever made for a photograph — that frame is The Crown. This one happened at the other end of the same very long day, while we were working our way back toward Denver.

I remember almost nothing about deciding to take it. We needed a break from driving, the sky was clearly building into something, and there’s a pull-off at the top of the pass, so we stopped and ate lunch in the car because it was too cold and windy to want to be outside. Cyclists kept coming past, some of them in t-shirts, and I have thought about how cold they must have been fairly often since.

We read the interpretive signs while we were up there. That’s where the history on this spot came from: the pass was called Hunter Pass before it was Independence, and the first road through the Roaring Fork Valley was pushed over it in the 1880s.

Then the sky came good and I got the camera out. I shot it mainly for what was happening overhead, though the track running away into the frame is doing as much work as anything — it sits in the same family as Dovetail for me.

The day ended, nineteen hours after it started, with Narrow Gauge in a meadow outside Denver.