South Park, Colorado is real and it’s wonderful! No, it’s not the quirky two-dimensional town you see in the Comedy Central TV show. Instead it’s a high valley, covering 1,000 square miles of grassland, and situated between the Front Range and the Mosquito Range in central Colorado. It’s here that you can often find some of the most incredible contrasts between grassy planes, mountains, and Colorado’s spectacularly changing weather.

Rainstorms can change a scene quickly – from dramatic, to light, to cloudy again in an instant. The weather in Vermont had been incredibly rainy on our trip, and I had already been fortunate to capture a wonderful photo of Kenyon’s Barn about 20 minutes prior during a brief moment when the sunset could peak through and create some color. After the sunset, the remaining clouds became darker and more ominous, while fog begin to rise from the wet ground. Enough light remained that I could still find some pictures, and I settled on this wonderful barn that I had passed by many times but never photographed.

Spring in Vermont can be magical, and we were fortunate it put on a wonderful show for our trip over Memorial Day, 2019. The flowers were blooming, the grass was a lush green, and everything just felt so alive. And while it rained (a lot), I was especially fortunate to get out for some photography between the rainstorms to find this scene near Waitsfield.

When I think about my many photos of Vermont, this one has long been one of my favorites. And like so many of my photos, this one has a story about combining timing, location knowledge, and weather. They all aligned to let me take this photo, and any one of them could have ruined it otherwise. Thankfully, the end result is a nearly perfect capture of Vermont as a place and a feeling. 

The weather had been wild on our drive to Vermont. Thick angry clouds loomed in the sky while incredible rainfall pounded the car and flooded the surrounding fields. The Mad River was rising over its banks, and the highway patrol had closed VT-100 between Hancock and Granville because of high water. With no cell service, we had to use my Garmin GPS to plot an alternate route through the green mountains on back roads. We were incredibly tired by the time we arrived in Waitsfield, but then the weather started to clear and a little bit of sunlight peaked out in the gloom.