Yankee Boy Basin, Colorado, July 2020, Part 1

I photographed a number of times in Yankee Boy Basin, near Ouray, Colorado during my July, 2020 summer visit to Colorado.  The main reason for returning to this area several times, is a simple one.  It just happened to be the closest, most easily accessible place for scenic landscape photography from the state park where my son, his wife, and I were staying.

Navigating rocky, bouncy 4WD roads is required for access to many of the best places for landscape photography in this area and Yankee Boy Basin is one that my son felt most confident in being able to get to safely, early in the morning, then have time for other daytime exploration.  In the evening, it was possible to photograph here at sunset and get back down the 4WD road before total darkness set in and we would get back to our campsites in time to get a reasonably good night’s sleep before getting up again in the early morning hours for a sunrise shoot.

There is a mountain stream with a number of waterfalls along it here.  The middle two falls seem to be the most photogenic, so we spent much of our time in that area.

To get the image above, I stood right up against the closest part of the waterfall on the right side of the photo, backing into a bush, shooting downstream at 14mm to get the waterfall on my right into the shot.

There were wildflowers growing along the stream and I often included those in my images.  The image above is made looking upstream at this waterfall, while standing in the edge of the stream bed.  Even at 14mm from my position, I could only get a small portion of the waterfall in the photograph, while also including the wildflowers along the stream edge.

Standing a bit further back from the falls, on a rock ledge at the edge of the stream, I could get the entire waterfall in the image, while including the wildflowers and the rock outcrop on the right.

Since I’ve photographed in this area a number of times, I tried not to duplicate compositions from other shoots, which is not easily avoided.  It takes some work to avoid the most common compositions here.  I had some reservations about the composition in the above image, thinking it is too complex, but I have gotten some positive feedback on it, so I guess it worked better than I anticipated.

Readers will note the heavily overcast sky in most of these images.  I always like to have clouds to give the sky more interest, but heavy overcast can limit or eliminate the “golden” hour light at sunrise and/or sunset.

The image above is taken a few yards downstream from a waterfall, looking downstream at the mountainside in the distance.  During one similar photo shoot one afternoon, there was a family of three or four (man, wife and one or two young boys) in the area.  I kept trying to avoid them and had to wait several times as they walked into and out of my compositions.  If you are a purist landscape photographer, you know we try to avoid people in our shots most of the time.  Some tourists know this and try to minimize their interference with photographers, while others are totally unconcerned about walking directly in front of a photographer.  While composing an image similar to the one above, something hit the graduated neutral density filter mounted on the front of my lens, startling me, and I immediately heard the father, standing above me on the stream’s bank,  scolding one of the boys.  It turned out that the boy was throwing rocks in an indiscriminate manner and it was one of those rocks that struck my camera.  If not for the flexibility of the filter, it would have shattered rather than just get scratched.  If not for the filter, the lens would have most likely had significant damage.  Neither of the parents said a word to me about this event.  I had expected one would have at least inquired about damage and apologized for the kid’s action, which might have resulted in an injury and/or significant camera gear damage.  The scratches on the filter sometimes result in light streaks in my images.  Fortunately, I had the filter and much of my more expensive camera gear insured via scheduled property on my homeowner’s insurance policy, so I recuperated much of the replacement cost of the filter.

Yankee Boy Basin is popular with hikers and a good campsite for those that want to get the necessary early morning start on a hike up Mount Sneffels.  Still we saw only a few people during our early morning and late day visits here.

It is common to get afternoon thunderstorms in the upper elevations of the Rocky Mountains, but during the time we were here, there were more than the usual storms.  Some days were rainy for much of the day, which limited the time interval with our favorite light at sunrise and/or sunset.  We had to sometimes cut short our photography time to avoid the rain and get back down the mountainside before getting caught in a storm.

Of all the photos that I shot here, the one below is my favorite.

This image has so much of what landscape photographers look for in an image, late day sunlight highlighting the mountain tops, light beams in the clouds, silky smooth, flowing water and a sinuous stream leading the eye from the waterfall into the image.  More prominent wildflowers would have made this even better.

Since we visited here multiple times, there will be at least one more post of photos from this area.  Please click on the images to view them in higher resolution on my Flickr page.

Thanks for following,

Ken