It rained all day the previous day.
Not a storm. Just steady rain. Heavy for a while, then a drizzle, then heavy again. A little less, a little more, but it never actually stopped.
Most people stayed home. Warm, dry, cozy. Reasonable.
But I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it. Bad conditions make for great photos. Rain brings low clouds. Low clouds bring mood. And mood is the one thing you can’t fake.
The price is simple. You get cold. You get wet. You get miserable.
The reward is that you’re alone out there.
So I packed the camera and went.
I had a few ideas. The Flatirons, maybe. The lone tree. Or maybe a new patch of woodland.
I went to Chautauqua first. The Flatirons were completely socked in. Not moody and half hidden. Gone. I couldn’t even tell there were mountains back there. The lone tree, same story.
So, woods it was.
There isn’t much real woodland around Boulder, but there’s one spot I like, and I’ve been there enough times to know my way around. Or so I thought.
A little while in, a coyote crossed ahead of me.
Obviously I followed it. A coyote in the rain and fog? That could be something.
It kept moving. I kept following. And at some point I looked up and realized I had no idea where I was.
Two days of rain had turned the ground to soup. I was slipping and sliding everywhere. Mostly sliding. The coyote, naturally, was having no trouble at all.
It was getting dark. The rain picked up again. Fun.
I wasn’t scared. I knew that if I kept heading in roughly the right direction, I’d find something I recognized. It would just take a while, and I was going to be very wet by the end of it.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, being lost, losing light, finding my way back, I walked into this.
Tall pines fading into mist. The clouds sitting right down in the trees. Everything turning blue as the last of the light went. It looked like the opening scene of every October movie where someone really shouldn’t have gone into the woods.
That someone was me.
A few minutes earlier, I’d seen some deer in this same patch of forest. So I stood there, hoping one would wander into that gap between the trees.
They had other plans.
Still, I didn’t mind.
I didn’t get the Flatirons. I didn’t get the lone tree. I didn’t get the coyote.
I got lost instead.
And it was worth it.
