You should never start a blog post with an apology for not posting recently. It’s just bad form, and truthfully, who reads this blog regularly anyway? Even if you did, you’d notice that I haven’t posted anything — anything — since January.

But I feel the long absence is worth noting, if for no other reason than the major personal changes I’ve undergone since my last post.

I’ve started my own company.

Not a hobby company. Not a dabble-in-it-and-see-if-it-fits company.

A livelihood. A bona fide “wow, this is what I ought to be doing in life” company.

My business is called Headwaters Content, and its one of Denver’s first content strategy firms. What brought this about is a long and probably boring story (I think it’s interesting. You probably don’t). But needless to say, maintaining a photo blog has been a free-time activity, and since February, setting Headwaters up has been rather consuming, both from a labor-intensive and mentally fatiguing perspective.

So this weekend, Hailey and I set up the white seamless and took some head shots, as we were both in need of them for our company websites. And since our daughter is cuter than us both, and she couldn’t be left alone for more than 30 seconds, we brought her into the pictures.

So where does this leave Tanager Photography? I’m not sure. The passion is still very intense. I want to continue to take compelling images and share them with friends, family and an audience online. It’s just not a bill payer, so it can’t be my top free-time priority anymore because, well, free time doesn’t really exist the way it used to.

But we’ll be traveling soon, and I’ll be bringing my gear and obsessing over morning light conditions in no time. It won’t be another four months before I post new images. No way.

I’d hesitate to say I’m “into gear.” I’d rather read a personal finance blog than the Digital Photography Magazine Buyer’s Guide. In writing, gear is just not interesting.

Where things get interesting for me is when gear enables new techniques. Last year, I used BorrowLenses.com to rent a 200mm prime lens and a 24mm tilt-shift for Holy Week in Mexico. To have two new weapons in my bag made the week’s imagery 100% better. The 200mm allowed for more intimate candid shots during the processions, while the tilt-shift opened up hundreds of doors of creativity for my cityscape and architecture. It was like shooting in a third and fourth dimension.

For Kauai, I once again rented two lenses: this time, a 24mm–105mm zoom lens (a must for the helicopter tour) and a 45mm tilt-shift lens. Once again, the tilt-shift rocked.

Kalihiwai Beach; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 400, 1/2500 sec, f5

Tilt-shift photography is a bit hard to explain, so here’s the Wikipedia page. But in essence, its about manipulation. Tilting manipulates the plane of focus, while shifting reorients the subject in the image area without moving the camera back, thereby eliminating converging lines (handy in architecture imagery). The lens actually moves on the camera body. A knob pivots the lens up and down for tilting, while another knob slides the lens across the front of the camera. A third button rotates the lens on the camera body, so pretty quickly you can get funky.

In Kauai, I was shooting landscapes, and didn’t end up shifting as much as tilting, so all of the images in this post are the product of angling the lens up or down and rotating it on the camera body, and not shifting. I did a brief illustration on the above image to show how tilting alters the plane of focus. On conventional lenses, the focus is related to the distance from the camera (e.g., everything 10 feet away is in focus, while everything closer and further is out of focus). Think of that focused area as a plane. With tilting, that plane is redirected. Suddenly, a swath across the image will be in focus, which in the above image includes my brother Ben and his son Jeremiah some 30 feet away, footprints on the beach 25 feet away, and the surfers bobbing in the distance, some 200 yards away. Meanwhile, the waves 25 feet away, as well as the distant palms trees and nearby footprints, are heavily out of focus. At that moment, I wanted to train the viewers eye to my brother and the surfers at the same time.

Kalihiwai Beach; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 400, 1/3200 sec, f5

Here again I tilted and tried to get the plane of focus to follow the surf line into the distance. I almost nailed it. Because of its nature, shooting with a tilt-shift is all manual focus, so getting it exact is a challenge.

Waimea Canyon; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 200, 1/500 sec, f6.3

Everybody’s favorite effect with the tilt-shift is to “miniaturize” a landscape. By shooting down from a high vantage point and altering the plane of focus, you can make a landscape look like a handcrafted model. My best effort at this is the top image of the Hanalei Valley Lookout, but it also works well here on Waimea Canyon. Again, the key is having an elevated position and tilting down on the scene.

Kalapaki Beach; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 100, 1/1600 sec, f4
Hanalei Valley Taro Fields; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 200, 1/5000 sec, f4

Shooting vertical images with a tilt-shift lens can present its own challenges. I think that’s because I often go vertical when I’m looking up a bit, so as with the sailboat masts on Kalapaki Beach above, or the foreground/mid-ground/background of the taro fields at dusk, executing the right plane of focus can be difficult. Sometimes it works for completely the wrong reasons. The sailboat shot is actually mostly out of focus, but the bow on one boat, the surf and the clumps of palm trees are crisp, giving the shot a surprising intimacy (not what I was going after). On the taro field shot, I should have done a diagonal plane of focus going the other way with the sunbeams. Oh well.

Here are some other experiments:

Palms on Kalapaki Beach; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 100, 1/200 sec, f4

Wailua Falls; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 400, 1/640 sec, f4
Anini Beach; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 800, 1/320 sec, f7.1

Outrigger Canoe on Kalapaki Beach; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 400, 1/250 sec, f4

Palms on Kalapaki Beach; Canon 45mm TS-E, ISO 100, 1/1600 sec, f4

While on Kauai, Hailey and I took a 90-minute helicopter tour of the island with Jack Harter Helicopters. The tour was billed as a photographer’s tour because it went slower and took its time with each section of the trip. Because of this alone, I highly recommend it. Kauai’s interior and much of its coastline is inaccessible (to most of us) and seeing it by air is really the only way to truly get a sense for the island as a whole.

However, don’t kid yourself. Just because its labeled a “photographer’s tour” doesn’t mean you’ll get great shots. In fact, its very hard work to get semi-pro to professional quality shots from these kinds of tours. I’d even go so far as to say you can’t get professional grade images unless you go on a windowless/doorless flight, and risk getting wet (which you will, when the tour heads to Mount Waialeale, the wettest spot on Earth).

Obviously, my No. 1 reason to do the helicopter tour was to get amazing images of the Garden Isle. We dropped a lot of money, and learned a lot along the way. I figured it was worth it to do a photographer’s scouting report for those of you considering a similar trip. Here are six tips to make the most of it:

1.) Try to minimize switching lenses and bring two cameras if you have to – Jack Harter (and probably all other helicopter tours) don’t allow bags, and once you are on the chopper, its easy to see why. Space is tight, and between the straps, life preservers and headphone cords, a bag would be a tangled-up nightmare. So, without a bag, you have to be judicial with what you take. Your chief camera should have a zoom lens (24mm–105mm is ideal). The second camera can have a longer telephoto range or an experimental lens. I had good luck with a prime 200mm f/2.8 lens, but I’d imagine a 300mm would be too close to be practical. Hailey had the second camera and was trying to rock a 45mm tilt-shift, which was incredibly difficult under the conditions, but when it worked, it was amazing (upper right). Also, keep in mind that things happen fast on these tours (and I was on the 90-minute flight), so always stay one step ahead of the pilot in terms of what’s coming up and be prepared to have the right settings ahead of time. The last thing you’d want is to see Weeping Wall, frame the shot, and decide to switch lenses for a better focal length. The view will be gone by the time you’re set.

2.) Don’t fight glare. You can’t win. Just enjoy the views for a moment – Unless your tour is windowless, glare is inevitable, and can be frustrating if you let it bother you (see two examples above … and for the record, that is not a butt crack). They tell passengers on this tour to wear dark clothing to minimize glare, but that didn’t help us: our pilot wore shorts and his thighs were the leading contributors to glare from our angle. My advice? If the glare is bad, put the camera down and just enjoy the moment. You can’t fight it, but you can quickly fail to register just how spectacular that waterfall on the other side of pilot’s thigh-glare is.

3.) Be prepared for any seat in the house – The tour company will seat you specifically based on weigh distribution on the helicopter, so calling shotgun will do you no good. I was seated in the back row middle, which I thought would be the worst seat in the helicopter. It wasn’t the best, but it wasn’t horrible. I had good luck with the long lenses (24mm–105mm and my 200mm prime) from this spot, but glare was exaggerated from here, especially at wider than 50mm. Hailey was on the left side, back seat, and had less glare, but a whole different problem: the warped glass. Front center and front right would have probably been the best seats for shooting, but they also may have had significant glare. Hard to tell without sitting in that spot.

4.) Best light for the Na Pali Coast is evening light – Our departure was at 9:30am, and by 10:15am we were circling over the highlight of Kauai, the Na Pali Coast. Problem was, we were looking back into the light, which would have been fine if I could maneuver to harness the light. But buckled in, and with lots of glare out the right side of the helicopter, it was difficult to compose shots without major drawbacks. My point is this: it may be worth taking the risk to fly in the afternoon. The weather may set in, the crater may be extra cloudy and wet … heck, the flight might even be cancelled. But if you get sunny conditions in the late afternoon, the Na Pali would be a freaking photographic jackpot. Your call.

5.) Be prepared for darker conditions in the craters and inland valleys – This caught up with me at the Weeping Wall (above right) at the end of the tour, the one cloudy spot we encountered on our extraordinarily sunny trip. After firing a few frames, I realized my shutter speed was teetering around 1/60 second, way too slow to be shooting from a moving vehicle. Sure enough, a lot of the images from inland were throw-aways. It’s easy to just keep the camera on one setting the whole trip and forget about it, but the waterfalls of the interior are one of the most stellar sights on Earth. Best not to miss a shot of them because of complacency.

6.) Embrace post-production – While initially flipping through the 449 images we took while airborne, I had a bit of a sinking feeling. It didn’t appear I had much to show for my efforts. But back home, and after loading everything into Lightroom, it became clear I had a lot of good images. Most of this was just contrast adjustment, some of it was just cloning out a minor glare here and there. Nothing too technical, and nothing that altered the reality of what we saw. In the end, I’m just glad I kept shooting.

So remember how a few posts ago, I said that I wasn’t much of a beach person?

Well, I’m back from Kauai, and you can consider me converted: I love beaches … if by “beaches” you mean the stunning, drop-yer-jaw, how-could-God-design-such-a-perfect-thing beaches that seem to be nestled into every corner of the Garden Isle. In fact, after visiting Kauai for eight days, it may be safe to say I’m forever spoiled. The bar will be high for any future strips of sand I encounter (sorry, Chatfield Reservoir).

View Larger Map

We spent so much time discovering new beaches, I’m still picking sand out of my hair. Here are the 10 best I visited, with a few challengers we didn’t have enough time to see.

1. Ke’e Beach (near Haena) – It’s one thing to feel like you are driving to the end of the earth. It’s another thing to see a fiery sunset when you get there. Still another thing to have a rainbow hanging in the sky from where you just came from. Such was the majesty of Ke’e Beach on our final night on the island. Situated at the end of the road on the rugged North Shore, Ke’e Beach is the jumping off point for the Kalalau Trail along the Na Pali Coast, and it beholds a stellar view of the sea cliffs, especially in the evening hour. A ringed reef gives the illusion of safe swimming, but this being winter, the currents were brutal, and swimming was off limits. That was fine: watching the pyramids of rolling water pound the reef was just as thrilling as the misty explosion of light caressing the Na Pali.

2. Kauapea Beach (near Kilauea) – This gorgeous beach is often referred to as “Secret Beach” — “Misnomer Beach” might be more appropriate, especially when its located off of, I kid you not, “Secret Beach Road.” But while it has been discovered, it is still pristine, expansive, and filled with so many intimate coves, tide pools and empty strips of sand, you could spend day after day going back. We trekked down the 1/4-mile-long trail and promptly found a private platform of fine sand — elevated from the rough surf and ringed by black volcanic rock — for our 8-month-old daughter to dig into. A mile down the beach (after passing my brother and his family playing wave chase) we discovered sand-bottom tide pools replenished by the surf. This is how beaches should be … endless, vast and full of treasures.

3. Kalihiwai Beach (near Kilaeua) – To the west of Kauapea Beach lies this local fave on Kalihiwai Bay. My 7-year-old and 4-year-old nephews loved it for boogie-boarding, and I loved it for the curtains of mist that flooded the cove and created incredible light conditions … and seemingly endless creative possibilities for photography. Kalihiwai Stream feeds into the beach, and next time, I’d like to take a kayak up this beautiful river to Kalihiwai Falls.

4. Black Pot Beach/Hanalei Bay (Hanalei) – Here’s what I recommend: go to Java Kai in Hanalei before sunrise and get a cup of coffee and a surfer sandwich (bacon and eggs on an English muffin), and take it to Black Pot Beach where the Hanalei River meets the sea. Try to time it so that you witness the full moon set and the sun rise simultaneously, followed by a long stroll around the bay for as long as your legs can take you. Repeat every morning you’re there.

5. Haena Beach Park/Tunnels (Haena) – If for no other reason than to stare at powerful waves for an hour. This was the second beach we saw on the trip, and for a Kauai newbie like me, it was gripping. By late November, the waves get enormous in the Hawaiian Islands, and the breakers pounding the reef off of adjacent Tunnels Beach were easily 20-feet high. Nearby is Maniniholo Dry Cave, which is apparently where Puff the Magic Dragon lives (or where his inspired creators got massively baked and creatively mispronounced the nearest town Hon-uh-LEE!).

6. ‘Anini Beach Park (near Kilauea) – We stayed across the street from ‘Anini Beach, which was a shrewd move with four kids in tow. Nowhere else on the North Shore (or the rest of the island, from what I saw) has calmer waters than ‘Anini. A lengthy reef nearly a mile offshore protects this lagoon, and harbors the perfect habitat for green sea turtles (I swam with four of them in a 20-minute span). It’s not a particularly photogenic beach, but to really have it work its full effect on you, I recommend you go for a swim just after dawn. Do breaststroke, and use the distant Kilauea Lighthouse as your beacon. It will be one of most memorable swims you ever take.

7. Poipu Beach Park (Poipu) – What? A beach on the South Shore? I know: I’m not showing much love for the drier side of the island in this post. We made it down this way thrice: once to drive up Waimea Canyon, once we flew over it, and on the third visit, we actually went in the water. Where we dabbled in the sea and snorkeled with parrotfish was at Poipu Beach, easily the most crowded scene we would encounter all week, but not in a way that inhibited the magic of the place. In addition to the best snorkeling of our trip, we witnessed a magnificent sunset over the tidepools down the road, on the other side of Brennecke Beach.

8. Kalapaki Beach (Lihue) – After three or four visits to Kauai, this might not make the top 10, but it makes my list for nostalgic reasons. We departed on Thanksgiving night, and Kalapaki Beach is where we hung out before our 8pm flight (we also ate at Duke’s, but I’ll leave that for the food post later on). A ukelele duet provided the soundtrack, while the girls danced and the boys rolled on the perfectly manicured grass. It was a place where our family showed just happy and content we all are with life right now.

9. Kealia Beach (near Kapaa) – It’s impossible to miss Kealia en route to the North Shore. Stretching like a lazy hammock under a grove of trees twisted by the wind, this surf-pounded beach is as inviting as they come. It’s also a big surfing and boogie-boarding spot.

10. Larsen’s Beach (near Anahola) – This was the beach that made me realize just how different in character every beach on Kauai is. Located on the northeast corner of the island, Larsen’s feels arid and empty. This is what I imagine Lanai feeling like. Of course, like nearly every beach on this trip, the surf was up and going in the water would have been foolish. So instead my baby daughter tried to eat coral bits on the beach and my nephew discovered a mammoth, grotesque-but-totally-awesome blue lobster head on the beach.

So I was there for only eight days and will admit that I can’t call this the definitive list of Kauai beaches until I visit Honopu Beach, Lumahai Beach, Hideaway’s Beach, Lydgate Beach Park, Mahaulepu Beach, Shipwreck Beach and Polihale Beach. What other beaches do I need to visit next time? Comment below.

More Kauai-oriented posts to come in the next few weeks.

I’ve struggled to photograph the Maroon Bells in the past. Struggled because of two things: (1) everybody has photographed them and an original angle is getting more and more rare, and (2) they perfectly face to the east and, as a result, are often 2 stops more bright than their surroundings, making an even exposure especially tricky.

But then my wife took our daughter there for a day trip this past October (I was attending the Colorado Governor’s Conference on Tourism in nearby Snowmass) and she returned with a series of astonishingly original photos of the Bells. How did she overcome my two stumbling blocks?

Solution #1: visit the Maroon Bells with an adorable baby and let her eat the dirt on the shore of Maroon Lake — original photos abound — and …

Solution #2: visit in the fall when the sunlight is slanted and the exposure is more even.

Our daughter’s middle name is Autumn, and this being her first fall, well, it was especially meaningful to have the two of them join me in Snowmass for the conference. After the day’s sessions, I’d take Varenna off of Mom’s hands for a little bit, and go for a short jaunt through the aspens with her near the hotel. She’d squeal and kick with delight at being outside, at facing forward in the Baby Bjorn carrier, and at the sights and sounds and smells of the woods. She’s a Coloradan by birth, and already she is acting like one.

So when the conference ended and I had a little freedom to wander, we returned to Maroon Bells as a family and spent a few hours in the aspen glades and along the lake shore, watching a blizzard of leaves flutter over the lake as autumn had one last gasp before winter.

To end the trip with fresh peaches, or to end the trip with hot springs? That was the question.

And an easy question at that. For 10 years now, I’ve been wanting to take my wife to Colorado’s best hot springs: The Springs Inn in Pagosa Springs. The only issue was its distance from Denver. A full six-hour drive. Hey, let’s do it together for the first time with a five-month-old, right?

In truth, it would be right on the way back from Mesa Verde, and rather than do the entire circuit in reverse (start in Pagosa, move to Mesa Verde, up to Telluride, back home through Palisade) we thought a long soak would be the proper conclusion to this road trip.

Amazingly, nothing is close in this part of the state — at least by Denverites-with-an-infant standards. From Mesa Verde National Park it was two hours to Durango, and because of construction, another two hours to Pagosa. By the time we rolled into the Springs Inn, checked into our room, and changed into our suits, we were dying for some sulfur-mineral-water therapy.

Yes, that’s right: I said sulfur. These springs are delightfully stinky.

But as Hailey quickly found out (I’ve been a defender of sulfur for years because of this place), the big stink about the stink is simply overblown. For one, I think the smell has toned down over the years. Secondly, the high mineral content feels exceptional on the skin and has healing properties (and that’s not B.S. — I had a long skin ailment years ago that wouldn’t go away until I visited these springs. It’s been gone ever since).

Six hours of tackling the hot springs in shifts was just what we needed, though it would have been nice to soak in the pools together after dark a bit more (ya know, little girl’s bedtime, someone’s got to babysit, etc.).

We’d need as much tension reduction as possible, because the next day was brutal. The six-hour drive took nine because of all the breaks Varenna required. The road trip had finally got to her, and her car seat had become her mortal enemy. But we rolled into Denver seven days, five peaches, four tanks of gas, one breakdown and 51 diapers later. It had been a remarkable trip, and as we found out, Southwest Colorado has remained the most remarkable part of Colorado.

The last day in Mesa Verde began with our last breakfast at the ARAMARK cafeteria. After this day, we’d at least have options for food, but up on the mesa, it was compromise, compromise, compromise. The day before we tried the “world-famous” Navajo Taco for lunch. It was an utter joke. For ARAMARK, fossilized shammy = flat bread. And I won’t even go into the toppings…

Despite the bleak food situation in the national park, we weren’t looking to skadaddle too quickly. The dwelling tours were captivating, and we had to complete the trifecta with a morning climb/jaunt/crawl/tour of Balcony House.

While Cliff Palace overwhelms you with its grandeur, Balcony House moves you with its intimacy. There is no easy overlook off the road, no dramatic viewpoint on approach — just a nestled little community that you don’t really see until you’ve entered it via a 32-foot ladder. In fact, to leave the dwelling you have to crawl on your hands and knees through a narrow dusty passage before ascending two dramatic ladders back up to the mesa top. Not once do you have a stand-back-and-survey-the-whole-dwelling moment. It’s pretty cool because of it.

Upon entrance, to the right of the landing where the first ladder delivers you, is a small stone arch enclosing a pen of some kind (above). Archaeologists believe that the Ancestral Puebloans kept their turkeys in these pens, an ingenious construction that was part meat locker and part ADT security alarm. Spend any time among live turkeys and you quickly understand how frantic and nuts they are. If anything or anyone approached Balcony House, the turkeys would let the whole community know.

The dwelling takes its name from a 30-foot balcony attached to the second floor of one of the structures. You can see it in the middle left side of the top left photo of this blog post. Our ranger speculated that residents of the structure used the balcony as a hallway between rooms more than anything. Standing there, seeing 5-foot-9 tourists standing next to this balcony, you quickly begin to realize just how short the Ancestral Puebloans were. I asked the ranger about this, and sure enough, they averaged anywhere from 5-foot to 5-foot-3 in height, but then again, she noted, so did most people in 1300 AD.

I’ll be honest: I’m not one for tour guides in any scenario. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that they show you a place in the way they want you to see a place. The focus of a tour is never in sync with my eye, and 75% of the information goes in one ear and out the other. It’s just how I’m wired.

Plus, I think there is something lost when your questions are answered. I know very little about Siena’s Duomo, about the history of the Pantheon, and about the symbolism of the Good Friday Parade in San Miguel de Allende — but I understand them in a very different way that is visceral, emotional and full of curiosity. That’s because I approached them through the lens rather than through a tour guide. I’m not saying my way is better than their way. Not at all. I’m just saying their approach doesn’t suit me.

At one point, the ranger scolded me for moving five feet to the right to take a photo while she was talking. She said it threw off her concentration. My first instinct was to feel bad, but in hindsight, I think it was a bullshit thing to do. Bullshit because the only way to see Balcony House is by guided tour. The least the guides can do is allow for silent periods of five minutes here and there so that you can process the mystery of a place, or see it with your own eyes. But in the end, they have 45 minutes to tell you everything there is to know about the Ancestral Puebloan people, and like I said, with me, a lot of that goes in one ear and out the other.

Three days to see Mesa Verde was plenty, but considering that the main cliff dwellings are in canyons, where shadow and sunlight conspire for extreme contrast, we had to carefully plan which sites to visit when for fear of getting the wrong lighting conditions. This meant that we’d save the biggest and best cliff dwelling — Cliff Palace —  for the end of our second day.

This massive complex — North America’s largest cliff dwelling — hangs in an alcove tucked above Cliff Canyon, where evidence of the Ancestral Puebloan people is everywhere. Our first view of Cliff Palace was from the opposite side of the canyon rim, at a place called Sun Point View. Overlooking two forks in the canyon, the vantage is the one place in Mesa Verde where the whole of the Ancestral Puebloan civilization comes into view. Dwellings, ruins, and jumbled-up archaeological sites emerge from the walls and forest … the longer you look, the more you see.

Ultimately, a network appears — a civilization that was once interconnected and thriving. My imagination went wild standing there on that sun-baked overlook, visualizing the Puebloans as they traveled from dwelling to dwelling.

(Click on panorama for larger view)

The castle of this fiefdom is Cliff Palace (above center). Tucked in its protected corner of the canyon, it is massive in size — 150 rooms, 23 underground chambers (kivas) and an estimated population of 100. Considering that most dwellings from this era consist of 2 or 3 rooms, its an especially significant site.

Our ranger tour guide was more like a drill sergeant than a docent — his narrative on Ancestral Puebloan family life was barked more than recited, but he was fantastic, devoting extra attention to the infant mortality rate and day-to-day challenges of children (malnutrition, etc.).

From the main overlook next to the dwelling (photo above) he led us down a series of stairs, than down a ladder, and onto a trail that delivered us to the foot of the dwelling. In evening light, the walls and towers of Cliff Palace were absolutely radiant. Despite being in a group of 40 people, it wasn’t hard to imagine what this, the most magnificent dwelling in the park, must have looked like when first discovered by European descendants in 1891.

The tour went quickly, and 45 minutes after setting eyes on Cliff Palace, we ascended a series of ladders through a rocky crevice, climbing our way back to the car, where we tucked our tired little girl back into her car seat. Despite our better judgment (i.e. “get dinner, get girl to bed”) we made a run for Square Tower House before the sun set. Back around and across to the opposite mesa we rushed, reaching the overlook just in time to capture the three-story structure before it submerged into shade (above left).

The next morning we’d tour Balcony House and then leave for Pagosa Springs to conclude our trip. As much as I was enjoying the guided cliff-dwelling tours and short nature hikes, they paled in comparison to the joy of watching how well our five-month old girl was doing. This little one travels well.

Mesa Verde National Park has long been on my list. Located near the Four Corners and home to an extensive network of abandoned dwellings from the Ancestral Puebloan Indians, it is a magical place I should know well. After all, it is in Colorado and its an UNESCO World Heritage site (so is Macchu Piccu, the Roman Coliseum, and the Pyramids of Egypt).

But time and distance had conspired in my head to keep me from going. Why? It is 8 hours by car from Denver … so is Billings, Montana.

I last visited when I was two years old. Naturally, that shouldn’t count as “having been there.” However, one of the earliest memories of my life is from when we went into the kiva at Cedar Tree House (below). I think it stands out to me because we descended a ladder into a hole in the ground. That’s got to mess with your head when your that young.

So we arrived at Mesa Verde after another long afternoon in the car. Varenna had slept for much of the uneventful journey, but by the time we weaved through the emerald gambel-oak forest that covers the mesa just inside the park entrance, she was kicking and screaming. Emotionally, I kept feeling like we were being selfish for going on this trip, but the wonderful thing about six-month-olds is how short their memory is. One stop, one good break to roll around on a blanket, and everything is right with the world again.

After checking into the underwhelming Far View Lodge (run by ARAMARK, a hospitality company that only works where it has no competition: like stadiums, national parks, college campuses, etc., explaining why the standards for food and bedding are so low), we gently buckled Varenna back up and drove 20 minutes south to see the only dwelling we could reach before sundown — Cedar Tree House (left in second photos above), considered the best preserved dwelling, and home to the reconstructed kiva that you can climb down into.

By the time we reached it, however, it was closed for the day, gated off across the grotto, with a phalanx of 50 to 60 vultures watching vigil over it from the trees above. It appeared that a forest fire had at one point reached the top of the dwelling and been beaten back. The sky burst into lavendar and pink, and an eerie silence permeated the whole scene. No wonder the Ute Indians didn’t like this mesa after it was abandoned. There was definitely a haunted vibe. The only sign of life came from a family of turkeys on the rocks above the dwelling who humorously chased the vultures.

The next day, we traveled to Wetherill Mesa, which practically comprises half the park but only sees 20% of the park’s visitors. There we took a hiking tour to Long House with a nasally, patronizing guide who — despite her smarter-than-you tone — provided an impressive amount of information on the Ancestral Puebloan Indians, their way of life, and their subsequent disappearance from the mesa. Long House was especially fascinating because of the seep spring at the back of the dwelling, which filled cups chipped into the stone drip-by-drip (above right). How they were able to keep the entire population of the dwelling hydrated off this meager faucet is mystifying, amazing and admirable.

There was also an amazing structure hanging above the dwelling (below), apparently reserved for food storage.

Taking photos on a guided tour can be a little awkward (“uh-huh, uh-huh <click> … I’m listening <click>”) but its the only way to gain access to the dwellings, and for good reason. They would certainly get trashed (accidentally by the klutzy and intentionally by the greedy) if they weren’t heavily policed and patrolled. Even backing up to frame a shot, I had to be careful not to bump into an ancient brick wall.

Maybe if you gave tours to people like me, you’d take on a patronizing tone over time.

We were in Snowmass so I could attend the Colorado Governor’s Conference on Tourism. I spent much of the time in conference rooms, banquets and exhibit halls, while Hailey and Varenna got to explore. By Friday, however, I was liberated from the indoors and allowed a few hours to see Maroon Bells (above), the most famous mountains in Colorado, if not North America. They were stunning.

More to come … but first I’d like to plow through the rest of Telluride, Mesa Verde and Pagosa Springs.

And for the record, after these past three months, I am more in love with Colorado than ever before.