Rio Grande National Forest, September 21, 2020, Part 2

Continuing my morning photo shoot, I walked up FSR 250 towards my parking spot, using the roadway as a leading line.

The fall color development in the Aspens is not uniform.  It can be spotty, with whole groves of changed trees within a forest of trees that have not changed at all.  In the image above most of the trees on the right are well advanced in their fall foliage, while those on the left are just beginning to change.

The image above was selected for Flickr Explore and so far has received 234 faves out of 7124 views.

The image above is not an inspiring one, but it is a realistic scene along the roadside.

After walking farther than I had anticipated, my vehicle came into view.

Even though I did not walk very far through the forest to intersect the roadway below my parking place, the roadway went much farther through the forest to get to the same point downhill of here.

Forest Road. Nikon D850, Nikon 14-24mm @ 24mm, 1/125s, f/16, ISO 200.

Concluding my morning shoot along FSR 250, I drove westward, stopping at a pullout, that I had made note of my second day here, shortly before getting to the junction with FSR 380.

I walked past a metal gate into an open area scouting for a good vantage point from which to shoot a red top mountain with the forest in the foreground.  I had brought out my wide angle lens, but I soon decided that I needed to use a long lens to get the photo that I wanted.  Leaving my tripod on top of a flat top boulder in the open area, I retrieved my 80-400mm lens and walked back to the the tripod.

This photo is the final result:

It was not the best time of the day for the typical light that landscape photographers prefer, but it was overcast and the mountain top was occasionally highlighted in sunlight when there was a break in the clouds and I like the color layers in this image.

I continued to FSR 380 then to FSR 243 and to its end.  There were a couple of vehicles and a horse trailer already here, but no one around.

I was waffling about what to do this afternoon, but I was not very energetic.  After a light lunch, I read via my Kindle, then took a nap on the bench seat.

The morning had begun sunny and partly cloudy, but the afternoon became heavily overcast with intermittent light rain.

I heard another vehicle pull up, then I saw someone in hunting gear walking around looking at my vehicle.  I moved to the front driver’s seat, opened the door and chatted with one of the two hunters.  One remained in their truck, sheltered from the light rain.

They were from upstate New York and had been coming here for years during hunting season.  It seemed a long way to drive for a hunt, but I was told that there were no similar places for hunting in upstate New York.

The hunters eventually left and I lazed in my vehicle for the rest of the afternoon and camped here overnight, being greatly tempted to photograph the creek and waterfalls, that I had explored the previous day, the next morning.

More on that later,

Ken