The Flatirons from Below

The Flatirons are most often photographed from the meadows below them, in summer, near sunset, with a foreground of paintbrush or grass. There is a reason for this — the light hits the west-facing rock at exactly the wrong angle in the morning and exactly the right one at dusk, and the meadows are public land.

There is also, occasionally, an alternative. In late winter, after a storm, the Flatirons collect snow on their north-facing ledges and almost nowhere else. The result is a striped landscape no other configuration of light and weather produces, and it lasts about six hours before the wind redistributes it.

Living in Boulder has meant photographing the same rocks for fifty years from a distance of about three miles. They are the only mountains I know in this way, and the only ones I am still surprised by.