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Bear Lake Four Seasons
For some years, I have been intrigued with the idea of photographing exactly the same scene in all four seasons.
The problem was that few locations are actually of equal interest in every season of the year. Wildflower
fields that are lush and vibrant in mid-July are mud flats in spring and brown and brittle in fall. Evergreen
forests look much the same year-round unless decked with fresh snow. In mid-September, 2006, I photographed
the golden aspen above Bear Lake, in Rocky Mountain National Park, and suddenly realized that the location for Bear Lake Sunrise,
as I called the image, might be an ideal place to shoot in all four seasons. When spring arrived, I made
an image that featured the contrast of fresh green aspen leaves and the still-snowy heights of 14,259-foot Longs Peak. In
late summer, I visited Bear Lake twice more and was rewarded with a spectacular sunrise. I returned in
April, 2009, when a powerful spring storm had dumped 44 inches of new snow on Bear Lake, spent 45 minutes snowshoeing a quarter
of a mile to my shooting location, and made the final image in the series. Bear Lake
provides evidence of the massive glaciers that sculpted Rocky Mountain National Park in three major glacial periods over the
last 700,000 years. The most recent of these glacial advances, the Pinedale Glaciation, named for the town in Wyoming where
this advance was first studied, reached its maximum extent only 20,000 years ago ‒ in geological terms, barely a blink
of the eye. As these glaciers flowed downhill, they pushed enormous quantities of rock and sand in front
of them. When the climate warmed and the glaciers retreated, large chunks of ice occasionally became trapped
in the glacial debris. When the ice melted, it formed what geologists call a kettle lake. Bear
Lake is one such lake, as is Dream Lake just a mile away. Today only tiny glaciers still exist in Rocky
Mountain National Park. Trails starting at Bear Lake lead to three of them: Tyndall
Glacier, above Emerald Lake; Taylor Glacier, above Sky Pond; and Andrews Glacier, in a side valley above The Loch.
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| Longs Peak from Bear Lake in spring, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado |
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| Longs Peak from Bear Lake in summer, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado |
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| Longs Peak from Bear Lake in Autumn, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado |
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| Longs Peak from Bear Lake in winter, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado |
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