January was an exciting month due to my planned trip to Colorado and Wyoming. Months before this, I received a phone call from a friend saying that I needed to log on to a webpage at exactly 0700 mountain time to sign up for the “Twin Mountain Trudge,” a small, locally hosted ten-mile race through the woods and hills of Laramie, Wyoming. The race is free to sign up for and is notorious for being incredibly snowy. The friend who invited me lives in Colorado Springs, so we managed to get tickets and planned to meet in Colorado Springs and then drive together to Laramie.
This was a unique photo opportunity, and I wanted to bring something that wouldn't be too big and cumbersome during the run, so my Ricoh was the perfect candidate. One of the biggest drawbacks I found with the GRIIIx is the lack of weather sealing; however, I overcame this by placing it in a ziplock bag. It was tough to access during the race, although I made it a priority, and I was sick for the race, so I wasn't moving fast anyway. Running in 0-degree weather felt great on my lungs.
I realized afterward that I had left the HDF mode on for the entirety of the race, which isn’t a huge deal, but I wouldn’t have made that creative decision with some of the scenic pictures. The weather forecast for the run predicted no snow, but it ended up snowing sideways for the duration of the run. The HDF effect complements the snow, making it seem even softer.
The Twin Mountain Trudge is somewhat of a local tradition; it attracted about twenty people who were surprised to see that some had traveled all the way from North Carolina to participate. They were probably surprised that we had even heard of it. My favorite part of the race is a bottle of whiskey buried in the snow at the halfway mark, with which a friend and I got a photo before passing.
This was also a cool opportunity to use my DJI Mini Pro 4 drone, as my friend’s house in Colorado Springs is somewhat near the base of Pike’s Peak, in a beautiful mountain pass. I still have not finished processing all the photos, and I am trigger-happy with the built-in panorama features of the newer DJI drones. I attempted to fly the drone in Laramie; however, the wind proved to be too strong for my portable drone.
The weather in Wyoming seems to change extremely quickly, which we learned during the race and at the after-party, during which we discovered that this change can close the highway, the only obvious way to get back to the Airbnb. What was a 30-minute drive turned into a 3-hour ordeal, which involved us driving all the way south to Fort Collins, Colorado, and then back north to our destination. Before this, we had tried taking our Ford Focus off-road, through someone’s farm, and several other close back routes before giving up and accepting that the night would be much longer than anticipated. This ended up being a great send-off for one of my friends before leaving for Japan again.
