It took nearly an hour to discover what was happening.

We had hiked up to this meadow just outside Zermatt, on the trail that eventually leads to Zmutt and the North Face of the Matterhorn. It was getting hot, and Varenna was inspecting the gravel on the trail, handing her best specimens to Mom, and then pushing her stroller like the big girl she was proclaiming to be (“bick guhr! bick gurh!). We were all content, and not planning to go too far. After all, this appeared to be it: the iconic view of the Matterhorn, the one that conjures visions of alpenhorns and men yodeling “Ri-co-la” into the crisp glacial air.

But as we turned to head back to town, the moon was suddenly quite noticeable and on a very interesting course.

(Click on image for a larger version)

And so, over the course of maybe 20 minutes, it swooped low, landed on the summit of the Matterhorn, and temporarily turned the world’s most famous mountain into a Santa hat.

It disappeared, then reemerged, like an arrow piercing the heart of Switzerland and coming out the other side. It was our second-to-last full day in the country, but it felt like an apt conclusion to the trip.

Lucerne is said to be one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. I still have a lot of Europe to cover, but its hard to imagine a cleaner, more idyllic, more photogenic city than Lucerne. The place seems designed for postcards, coffeetable books and small 1-inch-by-1-inch decorative chocolate wrappers.

To get my best shots in Lucerne, I made my way to these places:

Capturing Blue Hour

There is a certain moment at dusk when an urban landscape looks its best. The grit fades into the shadows, the sky holds an ethereal cobalt, and the light of the buildings and streetlamps twinkle to life. It doesn’t last long, and in Lucerne I only had one true crack at it: the last night we were there. The previous two evenings I was too exhausted and jetlagged, and because the sun sets so late in Switzerland in June, I ducked in early before blue hour happened.

Fortunately, in the limited window I had, I lucked out and found one of the best vantage points in Lucerne. In the Google Map, I’ve labeled this image Jesuit Church at Blue Hour, and it was taken along the northern shore of the Reuss River.

Elements of Lucerne remind me of Venice — the stately bridges crossing placid water, the waterside restaurants with tourist menus in four languages, loads of drunks shouting into the wee hours (just add a thick cloud of rotting fish to the air and it might complete the vibe). This location, I feel, showed Lucerne at its romantic best.

Here’s another angle I played with while I had a quasi-blue hour. Like much of Europe in summer, dusk seems to last forever. It wasn’t really dark until 10pm or so, and since we were traveling with a 1-year-old, it was hard for all three of us to stay up that late. Still, from about 8:45pm to 9:45pm, there is a dwindled light that is fun to work with. From the Lake Bridge, you have this beautiful angle of both the Chapel Bridge and the Jesuit Church, with white swans in motion.

Working With Perspective

The crown jewel of Lucerne is the wooden Chapel Bridge, or Kapellbrücke, which spans the River Reuss on a diagonal. Dating back to 1333, it is historically important on two accounts: It is the oldest covered wooden bridge in Europe and the world’s oldest surviving truss bridge. It’s long corridor is decorated with paintings depicting the city’s history, though, tragically, many of these were lost in the 1993 fire that devastated much of the bridge (a boat moored to the bridge caught fire and it quickly spread).

Draped with colorful pansies and crowned by a stately brick tower, the Chapel Bridge’s exterior captures all the postcard attention. But I found the interior of the bridge provides more opportunities for creative photography. The bridge’s natural linear perspective, its artistic details, and the opportunity to incorporate the cityscape into the shot, all pose unique challenges.

The locations for the above and below photos are listed on the Google Map as Interior Chapel Bridge Shots and Interior Blue Hour Chapel Bridge, respectively.

The Postcard Shot

On the one sunny day we had in Lucerne, I rose early and so did my daughter, and the two of us cruised around the quiet city for a good 90 minutes. She’s only 1-year-old, and usually patient with me and my happy snapping. The biggest thing in Lucerne that really got her excited were the swans, and this location below — labeled Chapel Bridge and Mt. Pilatus — not only kept her happy and smiling, but it produced one of my favorite shots of the trip. I will post some tilt-shift images from here in a later post.

Beauty in the Details

Later on our trip, we went to Zermatt, where it is easy to get lulled into the habit of placing the Matterhorn in the background of every shot. The Chapel Bridge in Lucerne has a similar effect. It’s kind of like that guy at a wedding who seems to poke his head into every person’s photo and mug for the camera. Truthfully, I’m not sure I got enough variety to my Lucerne shots, but one subject that would have been fun to play with more are the town’s murals.

Colorful, vivid and lively, these painted walls decorate a few of the buildings (mostly restaurants) in the old town quarter of Lucerne. This one (above right, labeled Old Town Murals on the map) seemed to depict the harvest season, hell, and all the reasons why I hate clowns.

And this one (Zunfthaus zu Pfistern) suckered me in because I had never seen a golden pretzel before.

Finally, this fairy-tale like mural lies just across from the Harvest/Hell/Clown Show building. My one struggle in all of this was finding a unique way to frame these paintings. It just felt all too easy to crane my neck up and take a picture like a tourist. Oh well.

And because it’s like that dude at weddings who sneaks into every shot, here’s the Chapel Bridge one more time, from a vantage point labeled Quintessential Chapel Bridge.

(Click on images for a larger view)

I recently spent two weeks touring around Switzerland with my wife and our one-year-old daughter. It was a magnificent trip — one of those get-it-out-of-my-system-now kinds of trips while Varenna is young and portable. Ha! That’s at least what we thought when we booked the trip in January. She’s a bit more … mobile, shall we say.

But we had a very good time, and ultimately, I was pleasantly surprised with the images I returned home with. In the moment, we both were a bit distracted trying to keep our daughter entertained, engaged, and safe. We worked hard every hour of the trip, just not on photography. Or so it seemed.

Switzerland is a lavishly colorful place. Blessed with ample rain, fertile soil and some of the most chiseled mountains on this planet, it’s hard to take bad images. And if you are the type who comes home with 2,900 images on an external hard drive that need sorting, correcting and categorizing (I am raising my hand as I type this), an unfortunate thing starts to happen. You become numb to emerald green, cobalt blue and buttercup yellow.

Since Tanager Photography started in 2007, I’ve maintained that I am a color photographer. Tanagers are colorful birds, and they travel great distances. But I found myself appreciating a new aesthetic with my Swiss images, and it surprised me — desaturation. It’s nothing revolutionary, and believe me, I’m not acting like I just invented the iPad here. But as I edited my images and adjusted them, I couldn’t help but get excited seeing some of them transform as I moved the saturation slider to the left.

Our trip took us to four distinct places, each with their own photogenic qualities: Lucerne, with its wooden chapel bridge (above right and below); the Berner Oberland with its hulking glacier-clad peaks and lush pastures; Zermatt with the mighty Matterhorn (top); and Zürich, where scores of clock towers seem to suggest that the Swiss are punctual or something.

I’ll devote a later post to where and what to shoot in Lucerne, but its really all about that picturesque wooden bridge with its colorful flower trellises and multi-hued riverfront. I must have shot every conceivable angle on that bridge, but what rounded out the collection wasn’t a fresh angle so much as it was a treatment. By desaturating, the textures of the wood rose to the surface, making my collection of images on the bridge a lot more three dimensional.

The same thing occurred with my images from the Berner Oberland. Here you have the towering, snowy triumvirate of the Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger graced with these verdant green fields — truly one of the most spectacular scenes on earth — and yet, the temptation is to point a wide angle lens on it and turn the saturation up to 11 because that’s how it looks. In hindsight, one of my top pictures from the area was a simple shallow depth of field portrait of a pine-cone decoration hanging on the door of a house in Wengen (second from the top). Easiest shot in the world, and yet, when paired down and drained of its color, it just seemed to complete the other, wide-angle, saturated shots in my collection.

In Zermatt, where the landscape is drier and more harsh, adding a black-and-white treatment here and there seemed to give the land a new interpretation — that of a hostile moonscape covered in ice. I felt that the mountains surrounding Zermatt had been tamed by too much man-made activity (trams, trains, gondolas, cables, roads, girders, pipes, everywhere). Extracting that brutal harshness in the glacial landscape seemed like a nice counterpoint.

Ultimately, what gets me excited about travel photography is the whole collection from a place. Does it tell a story? In Switzerland, that story is buried in the textures of the land, the buildings and the people, and its not so easy to see at first. It wasn’t until I was at home in Denver, working in Lightroom, that I started to see these images come together in a way that was exciting as a whole. It took draining the color from select scenes — an act that defied my style as an artist — to make sense of the Swiss story.

Coming up: mountain porn, waterfalls, tilt-shifting Switzerland and shooters guides to Lucern, Zürich, Zermatt and the Berner Oberland. The Tanager Blog will be a busy place for the next few weeks.

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.

Well, here I am, two months after the trip, and I still have the international/sometimes kooky/always delicious flavors of Kauai on my taste buds. Here’s the best of what we had:

1. Puka Dog, Poipu – It’s the kind of food that inspires 1,001 Anthony Bourdain rants about post-hangover cures. A Polish sausage, a hole drilled through it, a tropical relish pumped through the open vein, and the whole thing slathered in garlic sauce and neatly fit into a tubular bun. Located in a shopping center, I’d rank it as the No. 1 reason to visit Poipu, with the snorkeling ranked second.

2. Kintaro, Kapa’a – This Kapa’a institution is unassuming enough (about as thrilling as a Benihana from the outside), but after a long day baking in the sun, this place’s parade of sushi, tepanyaki and other fresh locally caught fish is worth the long wait. On our night there, we enjoyed an incredible peanut-sauce mahi-mahi that may just be the best fish I’ve ever had.

3. Hanalei Taro & Juice Co., Hanalei – This little roadside shed packs a cornucopia of Kauai into its nice paper-plate lunches: Kalua pig, poi, lomi salmon, taro and coconut pudding bread, and taro mac salad (pictured at the top of this post). Much of the taro, if not all, is grown in the nearby taro fields, adding an extra dash of locavorism that can’t be dissed. The servers also dole out delicious smoothies (see Varenna’s smile, above) and ginger lemonade to die for.

4. Kilauea Farmers Market, Kilauea – Held every Tuesday at 4:30pm, the Kilauea Farmers Market starts in earnest with a car horn. It’s over within 30 minutes, as the fresh supply of locally grown apple bananas, papayas, herbs, veggies, and flowers are bought up quickly. I think I saw k.d. lang buying a coconut here, and I definitely ran into an old college buddy, who — as it turns out — is now a full-time farmer on Kauai. Stock up here if you’re renting a house and cooking your own meals.

5. Wishing Well Shave Ice, Hanalei – I personally thought the whole shave-ice experience in Kauai was overrated, until I had Wishing Wells snowball of sweet goodness: piña colada and coconut syrup ice served over Kona coffee ice cream. Took three quarts of water to recover from the teeth-sticking sweetness, but it was so worth it.

6. Kountry Kitchen, Kapa’a – Not much more to say about this country-styled breakfast joint other than two menu items: coconut French toast, and pumpkin-pie pancakes with macademia nuts.

7. Java Kai, Hanalei – True, it’s a bit of a franchise at this point, but I had no idea when Hailey, Varenna and I first walked into Java Kai off the main road in Hanalei. Turns out, we loved it enough to hit it three times on the trip: once for coffee, once again for crack-of-dawn breakfast sandwiches and more java, and a third time for an afternoon Thai coffee and Bone Builder Smoothie (which included pineapple, mango, banana, papaya, orange and ginger). Varenna and I split the smoothie, which may have been the best smoothie I’ve ever had.

8. Duke’s Restaurant, Lihue – Close to the airport and open on Thanksgiving: those were the only two credentials we were looking for on our last night on the island. Fortunately, Duke’s fit both bills, and not only did they serve a mean mai tai, a superb Thanksgiving buffet, and a heavenly seven-spiced ahi with papaya-mustard sauce — they also happened to have a sweet barefoot-on-the-beach vibe that served as the perfect send-off to our week in paradise.

So there you have it: Kauai’s best food and drink in one blog post. Hope the hyperbole wasn’t too overboard.

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

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.