Colorado

The National Parks

Chasing Light in Great Sand Dunes National Park
Bymichael September 14, 2026May 25, 2026

Some landscapes become part of our imagination through sheer improbability. Great Sand Dunes National Park contains the tallest sand dunes in North America — rising to 750 feet — standing directly at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. The dunes are not a transitional landscape between the mountains and the desert. They are pressed against the mountain wall, the sand meeting the snow-capped peaks at their base in a juxtaposition that the eye keeps trying to rationalize and cannot.

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The National Parks

The Light at Mesa Verde National Park
Bymichael July 16, 2026May 21, 2026

When planning a visit to America’s national parks, most destinations can be appreciated without significant background knowledge. You arrive at the Grand Canyon and the scale does the work. You arrive at Yellowstone and the thermal features explain themselves. Mesa Verde is different. Mesa Verde requires context before you arrive, or the cliff dwellings risk becoming something you photograph without fully understanding — impressive stone structures tucked into canyon walls, beautiful and ancient and somehow incomplete without the human story behind them.

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The National Parks

Storm Light in Rocky Mountain National Park
Bymichael June 10, 2026May 3, 2026

I have been to Rocky Mountain National Park before. I remember the scale of it — Trail Ridge Road climbing above the treeline into a tundra landscape that feels more like Alaska than Colorado, the elk in the meadows at Moraine Park in the golden hour, the way the mountains reflect in Bear Lake on a still morning before the day hikers arrive. I remember being moved by all of it. What I don’t remember doing is slowing down enough to find the specific light that makes this particular landscape different from every other mountain park I have visited.

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The National Parks

The Light at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park
Bymichael March 26, 2026April 27, 2026

Every photographer eventually builds a list of places they owe a proper visit. Black Canyon of the Gunnison went on that list on a long drive through Colorado — northern Arizona to Denver, catching a flight, the canyon appearing on the map as something worth a stop without quite registering what kind of stop it deserved.

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