Most visitors to Rocky Mountain National Park get their first taste of this other worldly experience when they drive over Trail Ridge Road. Trail Ridge Road being the highest continuous paved road in the continental United States allows visitors to Rocky the experience of this beautiful but difficult existence with fairly little effort and from the comfort of their vehicles. Stop at one of the many pull offs along Trail Ridge Road even and one is likely to find shorts and a t-shirt offer little comfort even in the middle of a summer afternoon.
The sub alpine zone in Rocky Mountain National Park hosts a wide variety of interesting photography subjects. Wildflowers such as blue columbines, red paintbrush and alpine sunflowers amongst the talus slopes, boulders and stunted plants. What really peaks my interest in these sub alpine areas are the tree’s. The limber pines and krummholz trees which are in a constant struggle for life against the harsh elements.
These limber pines and kummholz tree’s are often contorted and twisted by the wind and elements. The constant air flow at these high altitudes prevents the tree’s from growing in a windward direction. They are often only able to grow in a leeward direction. These tree’s will eventually succumb, sometimes after hundreds of years of existence. Even at this point, mother nature is not quite done sculpting and bleaching there remains.
I’ve been spying this particular pair of dead limber pines near Trail Ridge for sometime. This particular area of Trail Ridge has quite a few limber pine skeletons littering the ridgeline. Finally on Wednesday, the lighting and conditions came together perfectly. The winds were blowing at a pretty good clip, but would subside just long enough to allow me to capture these two tree’s free of any motion blur caused by the high winds. There are limber pines like these two scattered all over the high ridges near treeline in Rocky Mountain National Park, and I’ll continue to scour these ridges for new and interesting subjects.
One final shameless self promotion tidbit. One of my images of Watermill Beach was used for this week’s online edition of Vogue magazine. You can find a link to the article here. Vogue Magazine Watermill Beach Image