San Miguel County

• Gustave Flaubert.

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This was one of our first photo opportunity on our trip to Colorado, it’s also my favorite. We had initially thought that we will miss sunset on the second day as we will only reach Telluride around dinner time and by then the Sun would have gone behind the horizon. But just as sunset colors were lighting up the sky we rounded a corner and came across this view of the beautiful Trout Lake and these massive mountains standing guard.

This shot is pure luck as I was not aware of anything like this existing before I actually saw this scene happening right in front of me. The mountains have some red tinged rocks and when the warm sunlight fell on them it was like pure magic. I am glad Colorado decided to welcome us with such a spectacular sight on our first day.

• Camille Pissarro.

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Both my wife and I spend our initial years in New England when we moved to the US. We both attended college there and every time autumn came around all the streets of Boston would have spectacular foliage for us to enjoy. Every year we would plant a trip for next year as fall is an expensive season in New England and we couldn't afford much as grad students on a tight budget. Finally, we both got busy with our careers and that fall trip kept on getting postponed.

It was always on the back of my head that we never did Fall road trip as we always promised ourselves that we would do. The opportunity presented itself in 2016, I was about to change jobs and I managed to sneak in a 2-week break between jobs. My wife had to struggle a bit to get the vacation approved but we finally managed to get on with our road trip to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. We missed peak colors by a couple of days but still saw some of the most spectacular autumn scenes combined with mighty peaks of the Rocky Mountain range.

This shot was taken at the Last Dollar road which is a 4-wheel drive country road that crosses the foothills of the San Juan Mountains. This road is challenging when it's muddy but provides some spectacular scenery. There is a spot on the road when the colorful forest gives way to a grand vista of the San Juan Mountains. I noticed a line of aspens by a ridge and used them to contrast with the more expansive view of the valley and the mountains in the distance. The yellows in the scene was a little overwhelming so I made sure the white balance was on point.

• Desmond Tutu.

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On our trip to Colorado, one of the locations that interested me was the road they lovingly call as the Last Dollar Road. This is mostly a dirt road that passes through the San Juan mountains basically connecting Ridgway to the mountain town of Telluride. On a dry day this is pretty easy to drive if you have a vehicle with decent clearance but add rain or snow and the road becomes very tricky. I was torn between choosing to see the vistas from this amazing pass vs getting ourselves sidelined due to some problem pretty early in the trip. But my wife basically edged me into taking the trip and even if it was just after a rainy day, I am glad I did. Apparently the experience of driving a lot in Kerala’s muddy & slushy mountain road in torrential monsoons has made me into a decent mudder. Plus I had a Subaru with offroad capabilities compared to the ancient ambassador I used to drive. So we never got stuck even with road tires and for the first time our car looked properly dirty. To make it even better we got to see the stunning scenery this part of Colorado is known for.

• J. R. R. Tolkien.

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I found this picture in my backups while I was searching for an image for testing out my exposure blending skills. This was taken during our trip to Colorado last fall, if my memory is correct, this was taken on the Last Dollar road. I have a soft spot for rustic fences and when the fence has vivid fall colors and fourteener peaks behind them, I am sold.

Ridgway and Telluride area has so many beautiful sights, I think you’ll need a month to just cover them. I am glad I got at least 4 days to roam around and take pics of this stunning state.

• A. R. Ammons.

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Last dollar road near telluride Colorado was one of the most surprising little side trips we did during our trip to Colorado. This drive was my first venture off-road, and I had just learned that it rained the day before we were supposed to take the trail. This mountain pass is unpaved, and when it rains, the muddy conditions can make it difficult to traverse the pass for even dedicated 4x4 vehicles. I had an AWD Subaru with road tires that didn’t inspire a lot of confidence either.

While parts of the road were indeed muddy and challenging, our Subaru could manage even on crappy tires. What surprised us the most was how pretty the views were. Unfortunately, we missed peak fall colors, but there were still enough leaves on the trees, and combined with the backdrop of Colorado’s mighty mountains, the views were just spectacular. I loved this image because the scene had the rolling hills in the foreground with the San Juan Mountains in the backdrop. There are even a couple of cabins for scale. The sky also was beautiful, with some dramatic cloud formations. The other exciting aspect is that I didn’t take this shot during golden hour. The Sun was still pretty high up in the sky. I cannot wait to go back to these mountains.

• Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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Finally after almost an year my wife and I took a well deserved break and as usual it was a fall road trip across one of the most spectacular states of the US of A, Colorado. W drove straight from LA to flagstaff and then on our first day visited the four corners national monument and drove to Ridgway after a brief stop at Telluride. As we were driving to Telluride we came through this mountain pass and saw an alpine lake surrounded by some spectacular mountain peaks. The sunset light was perfect and so we decided to stop for sunset rather than drive to the location we had originally planned.

Turns out the decision to stop was a good one as the setting sun lit up the mountains spectacularly. Since the scene was really wide I decided to shoot a Panorama of two horizontal shots at about 35mm. I balanced the light using a 2-stop ND grad and a polarizing filter. Hope you like it.

• Frederick Douglass.

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Somewhere along the Last Dollar road, we chanced upon this Aspen Groves that still had a bit of color in them. We had planned to get to New England as our fall trip for 2017 but a wedding and some work commitments through our plans out the window. So I am reliving our last year’s fall trip will be posting some of the images I initially didn’t post here.

Hopefully this winter we will get to venture to some northern Cali coastlines and maybe explore Yosemite with some snow on the ground.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Another shot of the stunning last dollar road, this was taken more at the b of the road before the road got really muddy. We were passing beautiful rural ranches with tons of aspen groves and beautiful yellow splashes everywhere. We are hoping that this year hopefully we would finally get to visit New England during its signature season. It’s kind of sad that after living in Boston for almost 4 years I have never really explored New England that much except a couple of trips to the White Mountains and Vermont. We enjoyed exploring fall colors so much I have a hunch that this fall trips in Sept/Oct are going to be a norm for us.

• Edouard Manet.

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Last dollar road near Telluride, Colorado has to be one of the most strikingly scenic roads in the western United States. Certain parts of the road were dicey even though it hadn’t rained in a while and there were a couple of locations where I seriously questioned the sanity of my decision but with roadside vistas like this one I seriously wouldn’t complain.

We started from highway 62 so the initial part of our drive was pretty tame but as the road started climbing and started to twist around superlative views awaited us as if to tempt us away from abandoning the trip. Hope you all enjoy this shot as much as we had enjoyed taking it.

• Elbert Hubbard.

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Last Dollar Road from Ridgway, Colorado to Telluride is one of the best off-road trips we have taken in our short overlanding life. Fortunately, the road was not too muddy, and we managed to complete the entire drive in our outback with road tires. This shot was taken early in the ride as the mountains suddenly arose on either side. This place is unbelievably picturesque with amazing rustic fences and beautiful fall foliage by the foothills.

• William Wordsworth.

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On our trip to see fall in Colorado this was our first proper sighting of the beautiful golden aspens which makes the state famous for fall foliage. While planning the trip we assumed that this being an unusually hot summer, fall would be delayed in most of America and hence timed our trip for the second week of October. I was watching the Flickr pages for fall status and to my horror realized that fall actually came in early in Colorado. By then there was not much we could do and we decided to make the trip anyway. I was a bit scared that all the color will be gone by the time we reached there but to our relief we got a lot of color in the San Juan's and this view point of Ames during sunset was a true treat.

• Thomas Hood.

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Its been a while since we have been on the road and I have been going over the photos from some of our old trips. The fall road trip to Colorado didn’t go as we planned it. Had some family issues that I had to deal with in the middle of the night while we were in the middle of the trip. The last leg of the trip we had planned to venture into the north rim of the Grand Canyon on a camping trip, but we realized that we forgot to pack in our tent’s rain cover and a storm was incoming. So I drove another 5 hours to crash at a Las Vegas Casino. That was 11 hours of driving to reach vegas and to realize that our room was not available which led to a scramble to find a room and crash. I think we slept 16 hours straight after that brutal trip.

But looking back we had a blast during the trip, enjoying some of the best fall colors and mountains, oh god those mountain peaks. This shot was taken during a brae evening when we decided to cross the Last Dollar road on a stock Subaru. Thankfully it was dry with only patches of mud and we made it through safely. I didn’t post this image because I was not happy with my composition, the road is leading the eye away a bit from the mountain an I usually use them to lead the eye to the subject. So let me know what you think of this composition, Does it work or is it distracting?

• Benjamin Disraeli.

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Another classic shot of fall foliage from Colorado. This location is basically on the last dollar road close to Telluride. It's pretty easy to reach if you start from telluride as it's at the beginning of the road and is located adjacent to the paved section of the road. So obviously we started at the other end and drove through the magnificent Last Dollar road to reach here. We were at least a week past the peak foliage season but the views were still spectacular.

– Sigmund Freud.

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I took this shot during a trip to Colorado couple of years ago. Our plan for this trip was to hit the fall color hot spots of western Colorado. It took us two days of driving to get to Colorado from southern California and we didn’t see much fall color on our drive up to Ridgway, our first basecamp. But we decided to stick with the plan and woke up super early to explore one of the country roads that criss-cross rolling hills around the San Juan mountains. We were pleasantly surprised to see a lot of aspens and birches with some brilliant yellow color to the backdrop of mighty snow-capped mountains.

At Ridgway, we heard a lot about the Last Dollar Road which connects the San Juan Skyway to Highway 145. I have learned that in California, if you ask the locals about your chances with a stock Subaru Outback on a local 4x4 road they will err on the side of caution with their recommendation but the locals we met at Ridgway was all encouraging about our chances of successfully completing the trip. I was a bit skeptical as our car still had road tires and it rained the day before. But we decided to try our luck and headed out well before the golden hour so we could call for help if we get stuck. The scenery alongside this road is quite otherworldly and is a nature photographers dream. The terrain was wet and muddy but our car was able to handle the rough terrain and we were back at Ridgway in no time.