Traveling on the north side of 60 …
It was about fourteen months ago that I watched YouTube videos of photographer Thomas Heaton and friends describing their trip to the Canadian Rockies for winter photography. Thomas’s enthusiasm is infectious and I longed to visit some of the places he photographed, but I just couldn’t get on board with this idea. The temperatures would be frigid, and rolling out of bed in the middle of the night to catch a way-below-zero sunrise would be an absolutely crazy, miserable thing to do.
Despite what I just said, fast forward to last year where I found myself on the way to a winter cold-place photo trip of our own choosing. Marcy wanted to visit Rocky Mountain National Park and other parts of Colorado in winter and I agreed to the trip. Beforehand, I really spun into anxiety mode, imagining us caught in a blizzard in the high mountains. As I described in this post, about halfway through that trip, we found ourselves in the very blizzard I feared, as we drove over the 11,318 foot Freemont Pass toward Leadville, Colorado. Driving through the snow and cold turned out to not be a problem and we had so much fun, we booked another trip for 2021 – this time to Grand Teton National Park. The six-below zero Fahrenheit temps and calm wind mornings we encountered felt invigorating! (Plus there were very few other tourists.) With the help of an Amazon shipment of “Hot Hands“, a winter “cold place” trip is probably going to become an annual tradition.
On a cold January day, Marcy poses along East Boundary Road near Antelope Flats in Grand Teton National Park
