The other day, I took a link to a news article that was really mostly pictures.  10 Landscapes Magically Transformed by Light shows some stunning photographs, taken by professionals (with presumably very expensive cameras), at times of sunrise and sunset.  I have taken similar pictures, with a cheap camera, hoping to capture what my eye sees.

I often think I am the only one awake, alert, and out and about at sunrise.  I’m an early riser, as I have been all my life.  There is very little I find more magical than that early morning light, before and during a sunrise.  I am fortunate enough to usually be in a place where I can observe it, especially on weekdays, when I’m in the middle of my commute.  As I drive along the foothills from my town to Boulder, where I work, I have a wide, unobstructed view to the east across fields of cows and huge reservoirs of water.  Our sunrises here are spectacular, even on a day with no clouds.  But beyond that, those early mornings (and late evenings when the sun goes down behind the mountains) produce an unusual display of color, as well as an unusual effect that causes the landscape to be swathed in pastels, softened and lit in a very unique way.  When I see those colors, that softening of my environment, it is heart-stopping with its beauty.  All I want to do is pull my car off the road and sit and watch it transform into day.  The same happens in the evenings, when I catch a sunset doing the same thing to my world.

Photographers call this the “Golden Hour.”  It really isn’t an hour.  Sometimes it lasts for five minutes, or ten.  But it is fleeting, and gone before you can take it all in, most of the time.  If I have my camera handy, I take pictures.  Not fabulous ones like the link above.  But I catch the gist of it.  There is a magic to that time, when the world looks soft and happy and non-threatening.  There is no dread, or worry, when my world is in that Golden Hour.  It is a time when time seems to stop, but only long enough for you to say “wow” and suck in your breath. I know not too many people get to see sunrise, by choice.  I am not one of them.  I am often up before sunrise, ready to see that glorious Golden Hour one more time.

Someday, I will live in a place where I get to see sunrises and sunsets from my home.  I love my townhouse, but it’s in town, and I have only an obstructed view of my horizons during the Golden Hour.  By the time sunrise reaches us, it is too late for those pastels, that softened landscape.

The other day I watched as the sun went down over the mountains, during my commute home.  I wrote the below, and stopped to take a picture.  The words are more descriptive than the picture.

Sometimes, my Colorado is made of pastel blues; clouds floating along the blue sky, skimming across the blue-tinged pine-ridged mountains, the whole of it made misty and magical by a haze of moisture from the vapors of melting snow re-freezing as fog in the early twilight air. Everything is still,. The cold kisses your cheeks and makes you feel alive, yet so soft, calm and peaceful that you could gaze at those clouds forever.  Those pastel blues melt away the visions of brown, dead winter and you forget, for just a little while, how cold it really is.

This is my Colorado. This is my home.

Sunrise in Baraboo, Wisconsin, on the Baraboo River

Sunset from the front of my house, Longmont, Colorado

Sunset on the Front Range (taken from Lafayette, Colorado)

Sunrise from the mountains (taken near Peaceful Valley, Colorado)

Moonset above Long’s Peak, Colorado (taken from Longmont, Colorado)

Sunrise over Estes Park (looking northward)

Sunset at Coot Lake, taken after a heavy snowfall (near Boulder, Colorado)

Sunrise at Coot Lake after freezing fog (near Boulder, Colorado)

Sunset from downtown Longmont, Colorado.

Sunrise over Golden Ponds (Longmont, Colorado)

Sunrise from my back patio, Longmont, Colorado.

Sunrise at Lagerman Reservoir, near Gunbarrel, Colorado.

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