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Lodgepole Pines in Fog,
Mt. Evans, Colorado
One of my best selling photographs is this one of open grown lodgepole pine trees in the fog, high on a ridge near Mt. Evans in the Front Range of Colorado.
We were hunting elk, and my buddy and I had split up to stalk in separate areas. It was calm, quiet, kind of eerie. No elk or deer were around, but who cares when you're in the high country of Colorado without a care in the world?
Poking my way down a rocky ridge in the heavy fog, I often wondered if I knew where I was. Individual trees, forests, entire ridges would appear and disappear in the soup.
I never did kill an elk that day, but this photo has lasted a lifetime for me.
Lodgepole pine, so named because the Indians sought their straight, slim trunks as the framework for their tipis ("teepees") or lodges, need a lot of sunshine to grow well. Usually they jump into a disturbance such as an area burned over by wildfire, forming dense "dog hair" (thick as the hair on a dog's back) forests. However, where free from such crowding, they still grow straight and tall, but their crowns are able to branch out in a leisurely, almost featherly manner, such as you see here.
In this photo, the fog serves to reveal more than it shrouds.
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