Warm and windy is how the summer has started off so far in 2024 in Rocky Mountain National Park. After an active spring, summer has been pretty much summer like. It’s not been dry in the mountains as we have had rain showers many afternoons, but mornings and sunrises have tended to be mostly free of clouds but more importantly, very windy.

Rocky Mountain National Park is known as a windy location. Wind is something we deal with often in Rocky. The wind while a feature all year long, tends to abate or at least give photographers a few breaks here and there in the early mornings and late afternoon to take advantage of calm waters for reflections or long exposures on a group of wildflowers in a meadow or hillside.

Since about the middle of June this pattern has stuck and now it looks like we are going to trend towards much warmer weather at the end of this week. As of this writing, it appears that next week the weather will be more active again with instability and afternoon thunderstorms making a comeback to Rocky. Both the moisture and return of unstable weather will be welcome for photographers such as myself and anybody looking for some respite from the warmer weather at the end of this week.

Bad weather makes good photographs and as much as one might try, clear skies and breezy conditions are challenging no matter who is behind the viewfinder trying to create art and capture the beauty of Rocky Mountain National Park.

On Monday morning I headed into the park with mixed expectations. I had avoided the park over the 4th of July weekend as I had other commitments and frankly when RMNP is that busy, it’s a holiday and a weekend and the skies are clear, I’ll probably opt to sit out a sunrise or two. The skies were clear when I headed in and there was pretty much a 0% chance that there would be any cloud cover at sunrise.

It had rained pretty hard the night before and as I drove over the causeway over Lake Estes, there were hints of fog coming from the surface of the lake. I figured I would check out Moraine Park to see if there any ground fog present along the Big Thompson as there often can be after a night of rain. With little chance of a colorful sunrise, I headed down into Moraine Park where there was a thin layer of ground fog collecting on the middle to east end of Moraine Park.

I parked at the Cub Lake trail head and hiked around the meadow along the South Lateral Moraine until I could find a comp that would work with the current conditions. As is typical with these kind of mornings the fog was rising and falling by the minute all the while slowly evaporating and moving farther to the east.

Shortly after sunrise, along the Big Thompson River, I was able to capture this image of the fog in Moraine Park with Deer Mountain catching the early morning light. Obviously not the most dramatic sunrise I’ve capture here but one I was pleased with considering the difficult conditions for photography in Rocky as of late. In Baseball terms, sometimes you have to hit a bunch of singles before a home run. This was one of those types of mornings.