After my engagement session with Shannon and Kevin (which I will be posting soon), they asked me if Maggie and I would like to come up to Telluride for the weekend. Shannon was running in the Imogene Pass Run on Saturday and Kevin was going down to root her in. The run is a 17.1 mile race within the western San Juan mountains of Colorado, along a route which connects the towns of Ouray (7810 ft.) and Telluride (8750 ft.) by way of 13,114 foot Imogene Pass (taken directly from the website). In other words, it’s intense and I know I couldn’t do it without some serious training! Unfortunately, Maggie had to work on Saturday so I had to leave her at home. 😦 We left friday around noon and it took more than 8.5 hours to get to Telluride because of traffic! Long time to be in a car but I had the latest issue of Professional Photographer magazine and read it about 9 times.
Click below to read the rest of the post and see more pictures:
When we got into town and found a campsite, we ran into a little issue that could have been potentially disastrous. The Yakima storage box on top of Kevin’s car wouldn’t open! This wouldn’t have been too big a problem except that Kevin and Shannon’s tent and sleeping bags were in it. Luckily for all of us, my tent was in the car and I was able to set it up so that they could sleep in the car. I gave Kevin all my extra layers of clothing just in case. It was a pretty cold night for this time of year but snuggling with their dogs helped keep them warm.
When Kevin and I woke up, we went into town to try to find someone who would have a way to get the storage box open and we ended up at Telluride Sports. A friendly shop technician there told us that he had seen this happen three times this year and the only way to get in was to cut a hole in the box to access the latch. I have to say, it was both sad and funny to watch Kevin breaking in to his own $750 storage box with a hacksaw! I can only admit to it being funny because Yakima will replace the box under warranty…
After we got all that taken care of, we went up to the finish line of the race to wait for Shannon to come in. To pass the time, I took pictures of some of the other runners and rooted everyone on. A lot of these people had battle wounds on their legs and arms from falling on the way up or down and I knew that this race was no joke.
I almost didn’t recognize Shannon when she came in because of the hat she was wearing but saw her just in time to snap off a few good frames. Congrats to Shannon for completing this run!
We had a relaxing afternoon of walking around town and heading up the gondola to check out the mountain village before heading back to our campsite. While up on the mountain, I decided that we HAD to do another engagement photography session so we went back up around sunset. The photographs from that session will follow soon!
We headed back home to Denver on Sunday and took a much more scenic route to avoid the I70 traffic and it shaved a good deal of time off of our trip. We went over Cottonwood Canyon Pass, which I had never been on and were rewarded with some awesome mountain views. The pass put us out in the San Isabel National Forest near the Collegiate Peaks and that was a great part of the ride as well. Well, that’s it for this post. Thanks for reading!