Monday July 15th marked the beginning of our voyage into unbound creativity, close camaraderie, extreme motorcycle riding and awe-inspiring landscape. As you can imagine, I was at the same time excited and nervous, elated to focus on photography and sad to leave my two precious daughters and my lovely wife. Nonetheless, as things are, a man's got to do what a man's got to do...
The goals for our first day were to reach Guanella Pass campground above Georgetown, CO and to test our set-ups, making sure that the bikes ran well and that they - and we - could handle their load.
Broomfield to Georgetown is a quick drive via I-70 - 1 hour and a half or so - but Joe had planned a route that would take us there on Hwy 72 and dirt roads, by way of Rollinsville, Central city and Empire. This should take us about 3 hours.
Since the ride would be fairly short, we could take time to pack up our gear and get ready. This was a good thing, because I quickly realized that my front tire was flat... I hadn't even left the driveway yet!
So, we pulled the tire, changed the tube (good practice before the ride) loaded our bikes and were ready to roll.
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| Photograph courtesy of Joe Turse. |
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| Photograph courtesy of Joe Turse. |
I am happy to report that our first ride was uneventful; we made it to Central City quickly and efficiently. At that point, we decided to head towards Idaho Springs via Hwy 6 and onward to Georgetown via Alvarado Road.
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| Looking at the route on Joe's I-phone |
We arrived at the campground around 3 pm. After setting up the tents, we pushed to Guanella Pass. There we were greeted by fog and rain. The first view of the pass and mount evans looked like this:
The clouds were moving fast, which gave the sun brief opportunities to show himself:
Although I found the atmosphere mysterious and beautiful, it was obviously not the right weather for wet-plate collodion. We went back to our campground, enjoyed some food and wine and went to bed. In the morning, while Joe was packing up, I mounted my bike, headed to the pass. There I had to squeeze my motorcycle between two cars, as the parking lot was completely full. It was a nice morning and many people had decided to take advantage of the clement weather to hike Mount Evans.
I got all my gear out, set-up my camera, built my darkbox and had just time to shoot one plate since we had a long day of riding in front of us.
Although the plate is not perfect, I was happy with my first attempt of the trip and was looking forward to continue improving the quality of my photographs over the next few days.
Onward to the next destination...
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