I spent a quiet Christmas in Denver with my youngest daughter. I’ll spend New Years Day with my oldest up in Gainesville. Such are the logistics of keeping track of adult children scattered across the country. These two photos were taken just east of Bolder, looking west towards the Rockies. It was cold (lows in the single digits) and it snowed Christmas day to give my wife one thing she wanted, a white Christmas.

The Sunday before we left my wife and I drove in the general direction of Estes Park, stopping around Bolder to do a little sight-seeing and for me to grab a few long distance photos of the Rockies. I had a new lens with me, the M.Zuiko 14-150mm Mark II. I had it mated with my E-M5. That lens, and the 17mm f/1.8 were the only pieces of camera gear I took with me besides spare batteries and a charger. I left everything else at home and depended on my iPhone 6s+ as my backup camera. The top photo was taken at 150mm, while the bottom was taken at 14mm. The one body, one zoom and one prime kit is the most practical I’ve ever taken with me on travel, and it’ll probably remain that way indefinitely.

One reason I wanted the long view of the Rockies is as documentation of what snows look like on the Rockies. With all he talk of climate change I wanted a small remembrance of what snow looked like on those peaks before it melts completely away. While it got cold while we were there both the cold and the snow were short lived. When we left the following Monday it was starting to warm up to temperatures above freezing towards the end of the week. Back here in Orlando the temperatures during the day have been in the low 80s. We do live in interesting times, don’t we?