Here are some photos of one of my most favorite places ever: Phantom Canyon in the Colorado Rockies. I have well over a thousand photos of this canyon which is only about thirty miles long but takes more than two hours to drive. *laughing* It has often taken me days to get from one end to the other - because I love it there and make frequent and lengthy stops along the way!
This little canyon is beautiful, and I love it dearly. Yet it is but a tiny fraction of the mighty Rocky Mountains that stretch for thousands of miles from clear up in Canada down into New Mexico in the southern United States. The scope is almost beyond imagination.
There are high meadows, rank upon rank of forest, flora and fauna of amazing diversity, stone formations that will stun your eyes (they don't call them the Rockies for nothing, remember), and views that make you wish you had eyes all the way around your head.
At different places along the path of Phantom Canyon the road narrows to go between outcroppings of rock. I call these places 'gates' although they are not gated. The photo at the top of the page comes from one of those places. The stone seems to me to be shaped like a human figure when seen from certain angles. It is huge. I would like to one day find a way to get an actual person in a photo so as to provide perspective, but I'm almost always alone in my journeys through Phantom Canyon but for my dog Duke - and Duke is no good with a camera.
In all honesty I sincerely doubt that anybody, ever, could possibly capture the complexities of this mountain range to the extent that someone who isn't right there could share the sensations of enormity and tiny details ... all perfectly fitted together. I just don't think it can be done. You can catch bits and pieces, but the whole of it - no. If you're shooting aerially, you're missing the details; if you're on the ground you can sense the grandeur but you can't actually see it, not in its totality.
Somehow I get the feeling that the mountains themselves forbid the full knowing of them.
