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As a travel and landscape photographer who lives in the western United States, it’s a bit difficult to impress me with the grandness of a vista. So two years ago when we drove up the viewpoint to Buck Mesa for a fall foliage shot we didn’t expect much. For one there was precious little on the interwebs regarding the vista point or the view. Then the county road to this location gave our Subaru Outback a proper test of its offroad capabilities and once we reached we realized that the ridge I was thinking of taking the picture from was on private property. Add to that the mountain peaks were cloud covered and there was not much light to make the photo interesting. With no reference to the actual scene, all we saw was a valley covered with fog and clouds and some aspen groves that were past their foliage prime. I was ready to pack up and go as didn’t want to get stuck here once night falls and if something happened to the car, but my wife insisted that we stay till sunset even if we couldn’t see the sun.
Turns out she had excellent intuition, as I set up my camera and tripod, the wind started to whip up the clouds and started to clear them out of the valley. Also, the mountain peaks came to view, and the setting sun streaked through the clouds with some much-needed contrast and sharpness to the scene. I took this panorama as the wind started to clear some of the thick cloud cover from the left. Later we even got a nice golden ray of light on the mountains and it turned out to be a stunning photo. While packing up and preparing to leave this stunning location, my wife and I couldn’t stop smiling at each other, on some level we knew that this one was special.