I stayed around my campsite in the afternoon, waiting for my son and his wife to arrive from the Denver area. To occupy some of my time I sat outdoors, enjoying the mild weather, reading on my Kindle.
I kept seeing a curious chipmunk scampering about the campsite. It even jumped onto the arm of my camp chair, startling me.
At one point, I noticed the chipmunk on the side step below the side door of my vehicle, peering inside. This immediately alarmed me and I jumped up to shoo it away. Even though I had the bug screen zipped closed, I had neglected to completely fasten the bottom velcro seal. It was too late. The chipmunk entered my vehicle. I went in to try to find it and encourage it to go back outside.
There are plenty of places inside my vehicle for such a small animal to hide. While I was searching for the chipmunk, my son and DIL arrived. I left the vehicle to greet them, after which I continued to search for the chipmunk. I never found the chipmunk and I feared it pouncing upon me as I lay sleeping at night. Even if the chipmunk did not do harm itself, the shock of being pounced upon in the middle of the night might have caused a physical reaction resulting in my harming myself. I was also concerned it might hitch a ride back to my home or die inside the vehicle. To my relief, it apparently found its way back into the great outdoors of Colorado.
Late in the afternoon, we walked into the forest for an afternoon shoot.
Our wandering through the forest eventually led us to an open area on a steep slope, above another portion of the forest below. I saw streaks of light highlighting the grasses, similar to those I had shot, without great success, the previous day. But today I managed to get a much better image, with the image below, my favorite from this afternoon’s shoot. I cropped the image to remove the tops of trees and some sky in the wide angle image that distracted from the main subject, a beam of light, cutting diagonally across the image and ending at a small Aspen.
Leaving this area, we walked back towards the utility roadway. Until I looked closely at the image below, I had not realized that it included a portion of my DIL near the bottom left. I was shooting up from a slope and she was just on the other side of a rise.
I shot the image above from the utility right of way, looking into the forest to the west of the roadway.
I will cover the last portion of this shoot in the next blog.
Until then,
Ken