I used to think I hated the mountains.
The times in which I traversed north often led me to feel sick from the elevation.
Lightheaded, dizziness, accompanied by pangs of nausea which typically burned my senses whenever I stood amongst those tall peaks.
Heights were never a huge fear of mine. I’ve scrambled up cliffs and ziplined across tree lines. It was more a fear of the fall rather than the height itself.
Standing against the rising sun, a foot off of Trail Ridge Road, I realized I envy those who are surrounded by mountains.
Such a privilege to see such beauty every day.
The sheer shock and condescension from those who have no grasp of the agoraphobia that suffocates those from the flatlands. How cities don’t melt into the cliffside but rather deplete into smaller suburbs and dying towns into semi-rolling hills that shrink into desert in the south.
How odd.
As a photographer, it has become my job to capture the present; to skillfully execute correct framing and light.
Bending nature to my eye with the click of a button.
Insanity grips those of us who desperately try to obtain the shot.
I stare out at a multitude of landscapes before me, camera firm in my hands. The sweet pine smell fills my lungs. A crisp slap to my senses compared to the hay and ragweed of Texas. Humidity is an afterthought in the north, often saved for the forest floor.
I try to capture the tree line intermingling with the rock of mountains against the horizon. A hazy blue broken by the bright green.
I wonder what it was like years ago; leaves changing color blanketing the ground in their yellows and browns.
I try to capture the river's edge as it flows into the lake. Crickets sing around me; the sound comforting when compared to that desolate hum from the data center being built in Amarillo.
All the lakes back home are man-made. A testament to humanity’s ingenuity and stubbornness amid nature’s warnings.
Who in their right mind would build homes in a desert?
Pilgrims, cowboys, wanderers.
Southern mythology at its finest.
I try to capture the dying light over Painter’s Wall-one of the tallest cliffs in Colorado.
The landscape initially put a sour taste in my mouth. A bile akin to drinking too many craft beers from the night before.
The Black Canyon of the Gunnison was nothing like Rocky Mountain National Park.
This is no place of pines and smoke.
It reminded me of Lubbock; ironically, I felt claustrophobic.
I spent over thirty minutes attempting to get the shot.
Contorting my body in awkward positions hoping to get just the right angle.
Laying across the cliffside edge hoping to get those last rays of golden honeyed sunshine.
I remove the viewfinder from my gaze to reveal the great expanse of the land before me.
My breath stops as the wind blows through the canyon’s edge, whispering to me. I felt tears pool at the corners of my eyes taking in the rich pinks and soft oranges dancing across the horizon.
Candy-light as one of my old professors would say.
The sour taste morphs into a sweet caramel.
I shrink into myself then, gazing out at that never ending canyon.
I realize it's a fool’s errand we photographers have in the grand scheme of art and catalogue.
After all, how funny is it to think that we could ever think to capture something so magnificent.
