My son and I mountain biked and then climbed high atop an opposing ridge located in the San Juan Mountains to capture the rising Super Moon. With great anticipation we waited. Just before the moon came up, we were fortunate to see a large black bear foraging below from our clifftop vantage making our experience even better. Thankfully, the moon came up while there was still enough light to highlight the beautiful Belt of Venus radiating above the horizon. Incredible evening – one to remember…

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The San Juan Mountains are finally off to a good start after a dry fall. Just a few days before the mountains were nearly bare making this a much needed storm.  I went up last night with my faithful beagle-mix companion and ran through knee deep powder at 10K.
This second shot was taken well after sunset at the magical hour when the belt of venus takes over with it’s vivid violet and deep blue colors. It was bitter cold which made for nice crisp colors on the horizon.

 With frozen fingers, I couldn’t feel the shutter button but managed to get some shots off but paid the price on the way home during the thaw. I really need to bring a butane burner along…

Wishing everyone a wonderful, blessed Thanksgiving!

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Canon 6D, 70–300 f/4L, f/14, 1/60 sec, 320 ISO, 70mm, Dolica carbon tripod, Manfrotto monopod, Lowpro flipside backpack, and Abobe lightroom 6 for editing.

Continuing from my last blog, my visit to Artist Point didn’t stop there.  The last day of my trip I decided to pack it in. I was staying across the boarder in BC, Canada and planned to go salmon fishing. The local rivers were full of large 20-30 pound Springs (or Chinook) but I was after the Coho.  The Coho run had just started so fishing was pretty tough.  By late afternoon, I was finally able to catch one.

 This only left me a few hours to make it up to the Artist Point area in hopes of catching a sunset as well.  The traffic was terrible as most of the Canadians were coming back from there long Thanksgiving weekend.  It took forever to get to the US border crossing and thankfully it wasn’t busy.  Long story short, I made it in time to hike up to a nice vantage point. I was pleasantly surprised to see a half moon rise over Mt. Baker just before sunset.  Unfortunately local low lying clouds were obscuring part of Mt. Baker so I had to wait for a while until it cleared.  The picture shown was taken well after the sun went down but the beautiful Belt of Venus more than made up for it.

It was quite spectacular to witness this massive glaciated volcano with the moon above and all the brilliant fall colors surrounding it! This will definitely become an annual pilgrimage.

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