When we first saw this week’s theme, landscape, we thought it would be easy to choose a landscape photo. After all, we go hiking all of the time and take a lot of photographs of the mountain ranges. When we started looking through our pictures, though, it became tougher than we had first imagined. Not because we didn’t have anything that we thought would work, but because we found a lot of photos that we thought would be appropriate. After much debating, we decided on this picture, which was taken in September of 2010 when we were in Beaver Creek, Colorado.
Scenic Mountains
Here are a couple of other photos that we considered, but ultimately chose not to use.
Hiking Near Cripple Creek, ColoradoAnother Photo from Beaver Creek
After a couple of weeks with snowy weather in Colorado, we finally had a gorgeous weekend with warm temperatures. We decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather and go hiking in Castlewood Canyon State Park. Our thought was that hiking in the canyon would be better than trying to get up into the mountains, which are still covered in snow. Unfortunately, it seemed that just about every other person had the same thought as we did and the park was absolutely packed with families, small children, and dogs. When we go hiking, we usually prefer to go someplace where we can get away from people and truly get ourselves lost in nature, but obviously that wasn’t going to happen on this hike.
The Start of the HikeBoulders Against a Beautiful Blue SkyRugged Cliff
Disappointed, but still wanting to get a hike in, we jumped onto the trail along with a lot of other people. As we continued hiking along the trail, we did get some separation from other people, so we were starting to enjoy the hike a little more. After hiking for about thirty minutes, we came to a section of the trail that was under water due to run-off from the snow melting. It was a bottleneck of people trying to hop across rocks with small children and dogs, which wasn’t particularly smart by some of them considering how strong the current was.
Open Prairie as We Neared the Canyon AreaHillside Covered in SnowCanyon Wall
We stood on the bank of the stream, waiting for fifteen minutes as a family tried to cross the rushing water. After having one dog and their youngest daughter fall into the water, they finally turned back. We were tired of waiting, frustrated with the crowds and the muddy conditions, so we turned around and headed back to the car. It certainly wasn’t the hike that we were hoping for and was pretty disappointing.
Some of the Scenery was BeautifulIt was a Beautiful DayNo Spring Foliage Yet
It was just a reminder to ourselves that hiking in early spring in Colorado, the conditions can always be tough. Melting snow often causes the streams to overrun their banks and places where the trails cross them can become impassable. We’ll go back to the canyon and hike again sometime, but not on the weekend. We’ve hiked the canyon in the past when the kids were young and it is a beautiful park, but we’d prefer to enjoy it when it isn’t quite as crowded.
For this week’s challenge, Half-Light, we were supposed to take inspiration from a poem, song lyric, or literary work of art for a picture that captured the moments just before dusk. Watching the ships coming in from the Strait of Gibraltar brought back fond memories for us since we lived on the water for the first year of our marriage. We used to sit outside in the restaurants and watch the fishing ships come in to the harbor through the channel in Ocean City, Maryland.
“But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.” – Santiago from Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea.
Cargo Ships on the Strait of Gibraltar
The day that we took this picture, the sea had clearly decided to grant her favors to the cargo ships as the water was as calm as glass. The calm water just adds to the reflection of the sun, which is just starting to make its way down towards the horizon. We thought that the photo below, from Estepona, Spain, would have also been fitting, but thought that the photo from Gibraltar was more fitting.
