Photography at Sunset

Wow, look at me.  Two posts in one day!

There's a hill not far from our house that overlooks the valley we live in (and down into the valley on the other side), with a hiking trail up to the top.  After taking our photography class a few weeks ago, Steve and I have been wanting to hike to the top to take sunset pictures.

The weekend of our class, we remembered right about 5:00, jumped into the car, and got to the trail head right as the sun was dipping behind the hill.  It was the most recent full moon, so instead of sunset pictures, we ended up trying to take pictures of the moon.  (It's harder than you might think.)

The next two weekends, we got busy and forgot until it was too late.

So this weekend, we planned ahead.  It's staying light out longer, so at about 4:45, we headed out.

In all our thinking about taking sunset pictures from the top of the hill, we planned to get to the top by sunset.  We didn't think about how we'd get back down, once the sun was gone.

Turns out, this particular hill has two trails: one is a long, gentle, winding path; the other is very steep and a little treacherous (in my opinion).  We ended up on the latter.  The whole way up, all I could think was that there was no way I was going to be able to navigate back down in the dark.  Without a flashlight. 

I wanted to turn around at least a half-dozen times.  Steve kept pointing out the meandering path, across a gully to our left, and saying, "If we get to the top, we'll meet up with that path.  We can take it back."

The top, of course, was beautiful.  We took some pictures, and kept our eye on the sun and the time.  Then we headed for the gentle path back.

We ended up on a sort of hybrid path, taking about half of the gentle trail and cutting off many of the switch-backs with steeper shortcuts, in favor of the ever-so-quickly darkening sky.

Next time I get into my head to take a sunset hike on a trail I haven't done before, I'm going to do it once in the middle of the day first, so I know where I'm going.

And I'm going to bring a flashlight.

The back side of the hill: our little valley, half in shadow

Flying saucers?

Where did the sunset go?