Day 5

After last night’s tacos, we headed off into the wilderness and put up for the night. Our morning plans were for the lesser-known reflection opportunity of Crystal Lake. Okay, for any of you who know of the place, that was obviously a joke.

Just as expected, we shot the sunrise at the lake with about 50 of our closest strangers. Regardless, the morning’s shoot went okay. I’ve definitely seen better sunrises from this location, but you know what they say; “A day in the field behind the camera is better than any day at the office!” Okay, not sure if “they” say that, but I do. With Crystal Lake images safely stored in the cameras, it was time to move on to the Dallas Divide Overlook and some breakfast.

After shooting at the overlook, we moved to Owl Creek Pass. We shot what I refer to as Gold Leaf Road. I about had a heart attack as my SD Card had an error. I couldn't see many images on my primary camera’s SD cards. The card only showed 102 images, yet I’d not backed it up the entire trip. There should have been well over 1,000 images on my card. It seems I lost days worth of images!

Frustrated by my SD card situation, I decided to take a walk and get away from it for a minute while simultaneously making a copy of what images I did have onto my laptop. I took a walk across Deb’s Meadow and into the trees a bit. With the light fading, I snapped the below image, took a deep breath, and made my way back to my computer and the SD card.

 Earlier, my heart sank after seeing that SD card error. However, I shoot with dual SD cards and use the second as a backup. This allowed me to have copies of all of the images that I’d shot since the trip began. While Ben was out shooting the sunset from Deb's Meadow, my work continued as I backed up all of my images to my laptop. Nothing like a panic attack to make you do the things you should’ve been doing all along! With my images backed up, I reformatted my SD cards in the hopes of clearing any issues with them, then turned my focus, literally, to the evening’s sunset and Chimney Rock.

In previous trips to this location, I made the climb up to the cliff edges above and shot Chimney Rock from there. It’s a heckuva hike. Probably the most difficult 1-mile hike I’ve done. Was it worth it? You be the judge.

After the evening’s shoot, we turned our attention to the morning’s plans. They would, hopefully, involve autumn colors and glass-like reflections!