Mount Princeton Hike

Mt Princeton, the mountain I see everyday when I leave my apartment. The one that has been calling my name since we moved to Buena Vista. But since we moved in, we've been so busy with shoots and editing and traveling I've had no time to plan to hike a fourteener. But I've been determined to get one fourteener in before the winter hits, and Nate was busy with work, so I reached out to someone I'd been following on instagram (@callielizzy hey hey) who posted photos of Mount Yale the week before. She agreed to hike with me and lucky for me, she had Mt Princeton on her mind too.

We did a route that was 9.5 miles round trip with 3 miles of it on a dirt road. We started right around 10,000ft at 7am. Compared to the two other fourteeners I've done, this one was actually pretty easy. There was a well marked trail almost the whole way up, until we got to the scree field leading to the summit which was super steep. Just when we started making the final push for the summit, a snow cloud blew in out of nowhere. It started lightly snowing and suddenly we had very little visibility. I was shaking with exhaustion and anxiety about the thick cloud rolling in, but we were so close and too determined to get to the summit to turn around. So we pushed further up, and the cloud dissipated shortly after reaching the summit. We made it! Yay!

Okay so a little out of the norm here. I edited these completely differently than I normally edit my photos and I also cropped in ALOT on some of these to really focus on composition. I was shooting on a 35mm at either f2 or f5.6 most of the time, so it was decently wide and I wanted to bring this in a bit. I squashed the highlights pretty hard and slid the white balance to be much warmer, then desaturated the images overall and brought back the saturation for particular colors (green, orange) with the sliders. Kinda weird stuff, but I like it for some reason.