Colorado

For those of you who don’t know, I spent almost two weeks in Colorado recently, and am just now getting around to putting pictures up. A group of five of us spent 9 wonderful days on the trail, treking through some of the most remote and beautiful parts of Colorado in the Weminuche Wilderness. For those interested in the details of our route, just ask and I can break it down step by step, but many parts of it will be clear from the comments on the full gallery of pictures.

For those interested, I took the D90 with a Tamron 17-50 2.8, and Seth graciously loaned me his Nikon 55-200 VR.  In addition I took my gorillapod and three batteries – the whole rig contributing about 4 pounds to my pack.  In retrospect, I would probably swap out the 17-50 for a lighter 18-55, even though the quality likely wouldn’t be as good – the weight would be hard to argue with, though. Additionally, I did suffer a near-catastrophic failure of my memory card, though with some good recovery software I was able to get a few of the images off. Not quite sure about the reason for the failure yet.

A full gallery, along with subtitles, is available here.

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View from our campsite on the first night.

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A Rocky Mountain Columbine

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The first part of our trip was hiking up the Vallecito Creek, shown here.

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Lots of lily-like flowers along the trail.

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The Guardian, as seen from our third camp.

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One of many mountain waterfalls.

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Leviathan Lake, pretty much the most beautiful place ever, even in this HDR-ish shot.

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A view of the lake in the morning, with the water still.

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Needed a new Facebook profile picture.

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We were joined by two goats – in this case Buddy.

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Yes, had to do a long exposure even in the mountains.  Why else would I take 3 batteries?

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Looking back to the west over the whole of the lake in the morning.

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Jagged Mountain. Note that Buddy (and Mable) decided to follow us over the pass.

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This is Floyd, our friendly neighborhood marmot.

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Brent, fishing on the Animas.