As an avid hiker and passionate photographer, it feels only natural that my most meaningful images are born on the trail.
There’s something deeply intimate about making a photograph in the middle of a raw, unfiltered experience. Unless I’m on assignment, I rarely stop for the camera unless the scene moves me on some personal level. That state of openness is easy to reach when you’re ten miles in, tired to the bone, and stripped down to essentials.
This particular view stopped me because it seemed to mirror my relationship with myself and the world around me in that moment. For most of the day, I had been buried in freezing fog, unable to see more than a foot ahead, despite forecasts promising wide cloud inversions. Overnight, the weather had shifted, leaving me the sole inhabitant of a world above 5,000 feet, isolated in a way that made me feel both entirely alone and not quite a person at all.
When I finally reached the summit above 6,000 feet, I drifted in and out of the clouds. Then, suddenly, the view opened to an uncanny reflection of my own sense of both existing and not existing at once. I set up my tripod and stayed with the trees as the clouds swept through, my fingers numbing, until I felt certain I had captured the strange void that held us both.
