Uncompahgre National Forest

• 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.

• 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.

• Audre Lorde.

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County road 8 near Ridgway, CO twists and turns its way through a ridge that provides superlative views on both sides of the stunning. There is a small inlet from the main road that leads to an elevated ledge from which spectacular views can be observed anywhere you look. One of the vistas you can view from this point is the valley between the mountains, basically looking over the township of Ridgway.

This sky came about after sunset when we almost packed up and was about to leave. There was very little light in the foreground and I was using a 2 stop ND grad, the image still came out a little underexposed in the foreground. But the colors in the sky was just spectacular.

• Robin Williams.

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On our last day at Ridgway, we explored county road 8 and I found out that the county road is marked wrong in Google maps. Basically, the road splits at a certain location and if you take the road Google maps suggest you will end up on a private road. I found this by chance as I was reading John Fielder's guide to Colorado and his directions to CO-08 didn't match the road which I mapped out in Google maps. So I switched to satellite view and found a road that was not visible in the normal map view of Google maps. I was still not sure so I kept an eye out while my wife was driving and as we reached the split in the road I noticed that the right turn would lead to a private road that was gated and locked.

Thankfully I had downloaded Jason Hatfield's fall guide to Colorado, which by the way I highly recommend and it had great directions to this awesome spot along the road. This spot gives great views of Cimarron Ridge South, Turret Ridge, Courthouse Mountain & Chimney Rock. There are some parking spaces and a small hiking path leading away from the lot to a small rock outcropping which provides this amazing view of Cimarron Ridge South. Thanks again for visiting.

• Douglas MacArthur.

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In this modern age of cellphones and advanced GPS handhelds that can fit into the form factor of a watch, it's extremely rare to go genuinely explore. Our real chance to explore happened during a trip to Colorado, some years ago. After extensive research, we identified a small town called Ridgway as our home base for exploring the San Juan Mountains. We planned to explore the various county roads that lead into the mountains. One of the roads that we marked for exploration was the County Road 8, while it didn’t go into the San Juan Mountains, this road has some amazing view of Cimarron Ridge South, Turret Ridge, Courthouse Mountain & Chimney Rock.

While following the google map direction, we soon realized that the map was plain wrong, the road identified by the map turned out to be a long driveway. A check on the field guides didn’t help much, but when I switched to the satellite view on the map, I saw something that looked like a road. So reversed all the way and started trying out the other options at the intersections. After a couple of false starts finally, we got on the actual county Road 8 and managed to get to the point where we were going. The subject of this image is the stunning Cimarron Ridge South; we spend a fantastic evening photographing it in the best possible light, the fall foliage didn’t hurt either.

• 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.

• John Donne

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Here is another shot of the magnificent courthouse mountains and the chimney rock along with Turret ridge perfectly bathed in autumnal sunset light. We had to go through some pretty rough roads and some serious bushwhacking to get to this vantage point and boy was it worth it to get this view.

The town of Ridgway was the surprise of this trip, we met a lot of wonderful people, had amazing food and got to see some amazing scenery all around the little town nestled in the San Juan Mountains. We didn’t had enough time to explore some of the stunning hikes around the area and would love to comeback and explore some of the stunning vantage points I'd marked up while we were there.

• 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.

• 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.

V. S. Naipaul.

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Saw this cool little waterfall as we were driving back from Ouray, CO. The water flowing had a brilliant yellow color to it and there didn’t seem to be any signs of a flood. Moreover, we noticed that the water was discoloring the rocks that came in contact. We were really curious about what was giving the water the yellow color and later while stopping to take a shot of another mountain came across some local kids who explained why the water was so yellow. Basically, the water comes from snow melt of the nearby mountains which are highly rich in various minerals, these minerals then dissolve in water and gives it the brilliant yellow color.

It was beautiful to watch and we got so mesmerized by the color that we forgot all about our destination the bear creek falls. All in all, it turned out great that we got to see a beautiful and unique waterfall.

• Francis Bacon.

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Another shot from county road 8near Ridgway, Colorado. This was one of the most spectacular vistas I have ever seen with almost a 270 degree views of mountain and ridges and valleys. Plus we were there just past the fall peak on chilly autumn sunset lighting up Chimney rock formation.

This is a panorama stitch made of about 8 images just before sunset with Colorado’s spectacular yellow fall foliage in the foreground.

• Claude Monet.

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Courthouse and Chimney rock are two of the most prominent rock formations that you can observe from the stunning CO-08 near Ridgway, CO. We timed to get to this location just before sunset and had enough time to find the trail to get to the photo spot from which all the landmark rock formations and the valley which contain the town of Ridgway is visible.

Adding to the stunning rock formations where the carpet of brilliant yellow provided by huge groves of aspens everywhere. This was one of the most memorable places from our trip and I can’t wait to get back.

• 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.

• 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.