When the nights grow longer and the mornings take on a brisk chill, Coloradans take it as their cue to start planning a trip to the mountains to see the aspen leaves changing color. However, deciding exactly when to take that trip can be tricky.

The date when the leaves start changing can vary year to year by several weeks, depending on that summer’s weather. Elevation and latitude also play a role, with leaves changing sooner the farther north and higher above sea level you go. With all those complicating factors, no one knows for sure when the leaves will change until they do.

For Parker-based photographer Tad Bowman, the key date is Sept. 28. Having devoted himself to photographing Colorado’s fall colors each year for the past two decades, Bowman has come to regard that date as the official start of the Rocky Mountains’ annual autumn extravaganza, with peak color generally lasting through the first two weeks of October.

During that brief window of peak color, Bowman puts his regularly scheduled life on hiatus to become a full-time leaf peeper. Each fall, he takes his camera and goes on a multi-week camping trip ranging all across the state. The images he returns with are some of the best evocations of Colorado’s autumn glory.

Appropriately enough, Bowman began his career as a fall foliage landscape photographer at the locale near Aspen that people often call Colorado’s most photographed landscape: the Maroon Bells, as reflected in Maroon Lake. As it was his inaugural autumn expedition, he had yet to learn that, no matter how summery the day’s anticipated high temperature might be, the mornings are already winterishly cold.

Shivering in his jeans and a light jacket – not the down coat he has since learned he needed – Bowman hiked through the predawn darkness to get a vantage to photograph the Maroon Bell aglow in a spectacular sunrise, with the golden rays lighting up the mountains’ golden aspens. He soon discovered he was not the only person who set out that day with that brilliant plan. Upon arriving at Maroon Lake, he struggled to find a spot with an unobstructed view of the Bells and the Lake thanks to dozens, if not hundreds, of other photographers lining the lake’s shores.

As much as he loves the Maroon Bells, Bowman has not returned in recent years. Though photography is the ostensible purpose of his fall foliage trips, these days he wants to come away with the best possible experiences as opposed to the best photos. “When I’m out,” Bowman said, “the things I enjoy the most are the quieter moments, where I can reflect and connect to the scene.”

He found one of his favorite locations to do just that an hour’s drive down the Roaring Fork Valley from the Maroon Bells near Carbondale at Mount Sopris. Hiking around on the nearby trails early on in his leaf-peeping career, Bowman discovered a special spot that he knew would be the ideal place which to photograph the mountain.

When he first discovered this special spot, the weather conditions were not right for the photo he wanted to take. He returned the next year – same story. And so it went, year after year: Either the skies were cloudless and bland, or they were completely overcast and gray. Finally, on his sixth trip, his persistence paid off. When he arrived at the start of the golden hour just after sunset, he was lucky enough to find the clouds had positioned themselves perfectly to catch the colors of the sun’s parting rays.

Though Bowman attributes his photographing this and other scenes in the exact perfect light and weather to “luck,” it is probably more accurate to credit persistence – a more hard-earned variety of luck that only manifests when he keeps trying after years of disappointment.

That’s not to say the regular kind of luck hasn’t smiled on Bowman a few times. In fact, his most famous fall aspen photos came to him thanks to a rare instance of fate plopping a bit of random good fortune squarely into his lap. In 2011, a man he’d never met, whose name he has since forgotten, gave him a call after seeing some of Bowman’s golden aspen photos in a gallery.

In the mountains outside Telluride, the man told him, there’s a spot hardly anyone knows about that he had to check out – a spot where mysterious natural forces have twisted the trunks of the aspen trees in seemingly unnatural ways, bending them into S-curves that make them look like rearing snakes – or almost like they’re wiggling their hips dancing.

Bowman followed the tipster’s instructions, driving a four-wheel-drive road as far as he could before getting out and walking into the woods, picking his way carefully, as there was not a trail to guide him. Sure enough, right where his informant told them they would be, he found and photographed the strange trees. While others may have photographed the “dancing aspens” before Bowman did, his photos made jaws drop when he displayed them in a gallery in Denver’s Santa Fe Arts District.

In the years since Bowman’s first visit to the dancing aspens, the many photographers who now know about them have quite literally beaten a path to the trees through the previously trackless forest. The scene has become almost as iconic as the Maroon Bells. It’s no coincidence that, also like the Maroon Bells, Bowman hasn’t returned to the famous aspens in recent years – he’d rather try to discover the next iconic Colorado experience.

 “There’s nothing wrong with going after the iconic shots,” Bowman said. “There’s a reason everyone shoots them: They’re great. But I try to hike a new trail or drive a new road every trip I go out.”

As he explores those trails and roads for weeks at a time, he is entirely alone, save for his thoughts and the wilderness – and he seeks to commune as closely as possible with both. When he takes photos on his solo autumn outings, he isn’t motivated by aesthetics. It’s more of a spiritual feeling of documenting the relationship he forms with nature at its special time of transition each fall.



Mighty and majestic, the Maroon Bells reflect in Maroon Lake near Aspen.