Colorado Rockies Roads

Colorado Rockies

Roads Description

This site displays slide shows of images I took with a Nikon Coolpix (10x telephoto lens) while driving through the Colorado Rockies after moving to Palisade, CO about 4 years ago. Slidea are meant to give a feel for the scenery along US, State, and County roads and selected mountains ranges of the Colorado Rockies and to encourage people to visit Colorful Colorado (redundancy noted).

Roads with slide shows are shown as red lines on the image at right; heavy lines show US and State roads; narrow lines, county roads; segments are labeled with the number of photos. See Mountain Index for a map of mountain ranges. For automatic slide shows I modified HTML code from the Navy; for user-control source code is available at w3schools.com. Optional cycle time between images are linked on the Road Index and each set of slides.

2 seconds is too fast to grasp the concept behind images but provides a quick overview of the road
5 seconds to read most of the captions but not see what's on the images
10 seconds to read the caption and scan the images
30 seconds plenty of time to study the images
60 seconds only provided as a background series of images.

Direction along roads is indicated in the index and title tab though each direction presents a unique view of scenery. Slide shows always start with maps of the road highlighed in red on the same background as the image at right. Map are followed by road symbols or photos of the road signs at the beginning of roads. Then photos along the roads comprise the bulk of the slides. County maps are included for county roads; and road symbols of the State roads upon return. Slide shows end with road symbols or photos of the termination roads. Slide shows recycle to the initial map.

I try to include "backward" looks in pictures of each road (not always successfully) but favor forward-looking, snow capped peaks on clear Spring days. I time drives for many roads to capture snow capped peaks on such days. I take 200 to 400 photos on each road photographing trip. Other roads are pieced together from several visits at various times of year. I usually have a camera in the car to snap photos of items of interest such as peculiar lighting.

Using Adobe Photoshop I delete duplicates and out-of-focus images, cleanup selected images, and save them as JPG files of 1 Megabyte (MB) or less (small enough to display in 10 second cycle between images on most internet connections). I collect all Photoshopped images for a given road or mountain range in a separate folder often a hundred or more, scan the collection and choose images for slide shows, targeting one image for every 2-5 miles of roadway (50 to 20 images every 100 miles) and for mountain ranges about 50 per range.

I don't try to capture the "best" shot just "good enough" to give a feel for scenery along the road. I take many photos through the front windshield while driving. You can see reflections on images on a few slides. The Coolpix camera has troublesome spherical aberration (darkening) in corners of images. So these images are not candidates for photography awards. I propose "miles per image" (last column; lower values are more scenic) as a way to judge scenery.

I hope you enjoy the show. The slides may encourage you to drive the roads yourself on a fine day in late March to late May (snow capped peaks) or early October (golden Aspen) or any time of year. In winter check if the passes are open.