Early and late in the day, Colorado’s arid San Luis Valley on the state’s southern border with New Mexico flourishes in beauty. It is my treasured locale for landscape photography, and I return often.

Mt. Blanca, a tight group of peaks the Hispanic settlers called, “Sierra Blanca,” is the eastern gateway to the “The Valley,” a dried up lake bed that is the size of Rhode Island. Today “The Valley” is an abundant, varied agricultural area.

 

Four pinnacles form the Sierra Blanca group: Ellingwood to the north, Blanca Peak, Little Bear and Lindsey Peak to the south and east. Sierra Blanca looks like a single peak to the passersby on U.S. Hwy 160. 

 

The ant hills are huge and thrive in the sandy soil.  In 1988 just after sunrise, I photographed “Ant Hill and Mt. Blanca,” above, just after sunrise with Mt. Blanca about 40 miles to the north and west. The location was at the edge of Colorado Hwy 159 about three miles west out of  San Luis. The highway heads 17 miles south to Costilla, N. M., from San Luis, Colorado’s oldest town established in 1851.

In 1966 I took Colorado Hwy 142 between San Luis and Romeo on U.S, Hwy 285 and made this photo, “En el Valle de San Luis,” just east of U.S. Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar’s and fabled boxer Jack Dempsey’s hometown, Manassa, a community of 1,042 (2000). 

 

There the late afternoon light made the sage and rabbit brush glisten and the mesas graphic. The clouds were abundant, harmless and fascinating. At midday both landscapes would have been mundane and muddled in middle tones.