Saturday Jun 20, 2009 at 22:19
The prairie in bloom
Prairie Primrose
Alice and I journeyed back to the Pawnee National Grassland in north east Colorado last weekend, to catch the flower display. I hadn’t read any flower reports in advance of arriving, but, as soon as we were east of Ault on the 14, the display became quite astonishing.
I’ve since read elsewhere that this is one of the best blooms in years. Makes me hopeful for the rest of the flower season, given the rain and storms we’ve had for the past month (not to mention the copious late spring snows).
Prairie Primrose Portrait
The primary goal of the trip was to try capture a good sunrise or sunset image of the Pawnee Buttes – somewhere we’ve been three times before, without any real photographic successes to celebrate. Fourth time unlucky… Saturday evening was heavily clouded and stormy (and we didn’t fancy hanging around for the rain to turn the dirt roads to mud, given our recent experiences).
Dawn on Sunday offered nothing but clear skies. Also, the flowers in the vicinity of the Buttes couldn’t compare to those further west in the grasslands proper.
Pawnee Buttes (accidental soft focus)
I wouldn’t normally post such an obviously flawed photograph, but to be honest, despite my temporarily forgetting the concept of depth of field, I’m still quite fond of the idea of this photograph. I haven’t identified the plants, but they’re very characteristic of the lands surrounding the buttes. Shot from down low, they look somewhat butte-like themselves. While there’s too much dead space in the mid-ground here, you can get the idea of something of a line leading through the shot towards the buttes.
After shooting dawn down by the buttes, we ventured back to the trail head and ran into photographers Larry Ditto and Joe Zinn who had been shooting from the view point. By the time we got there, fog and cloud had rolled in from the north east covering the buttes at times, and had provided some better opportunities than Alice and I had found down the trail.
We left the area more or less in convoy. Joe and Larry had spotted the very attractive paintbrush specimen shown below. Not quite sure exactly what species this is (despite looking through 10 pages of images here).
Pawnee Paintbrush
On the way home, we stopped to grab some final close-ups of the prickly pear cactus that was keeping company with the prairie primrose:
Plains Prickly Pear
I’d highly recommend visiting this part of Colorado – in comparison with the mountains, it is effectively deserted, yet has a very special atmosphere of its own. If you’re into rural decay type images, some of the ghost towns and abandoned homestead buildings offer some good photographic opportunities. There are also windfarms and nuclear missile silos to add some technological spice to the mix!
Posted in Locations
Stephen · Saturday, June 20, 2009, 22:19 · Permalink
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10:22 18 Mar 2010