Sunday Jul 19, 2009 at 22:52

This isn't Crested Butte...

North Clear Creek Falls

Crested Butte, “wildflower capital” of Colorado, has it’s annual flower festival in the week of July 4th. We planned a trip there a few days later, hoping to catch the flowers at their peak.

Alas – too soon. While the flowers were in decent condition around town, where we’d planned to go – north of Gothic town, in the lower reaches of Rustler’s Gulch – nothing was yet happening.

Rather than (i) camp too high and have no flowers around or (ii) camp down low where things were crowded, we decided to head a little further south towards Creede, some 132 miles from Crested Butte.

The road to Creede passes through pretty Lake City, up and over Slumgullion Pass, then Spring Creek Pass, and down towards South and North Clear Creek. North Clear Creek Falls lies very close to the main road (the 149), in the midst of flat pasture, making the drop all the more impressive.

The image above took a little setting up. There was some cloud over the falls, but the sky was bright and partly sunny. To manage the sky (nice to have some in the frame for context) and to get a reasonable length exposure to show the falls at their best, I used a Singh-Ray Vari-ND filter to slow shutter speed and 3-Stop hard Grad ND to hold back the sky.

The exposure was half a second, giving the water long enough to trace some nice arcs. The cattle give a good sense of scale.

We had one more adventure on this trip (unfortunately not very fruitful photographically) which I’ll post about later.

Posted in Locations Equipment

Stephen · Sunday, July 19, 2009, 22:52 · Permalink

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