I recently spent several days in the Grand Junction, Colorado area. I visited the US National Park Service’s Colorado National Monument each day for winter landscape photography. Here are a number of favorites photographs from the week. I made these images in January late-afternoon or evening sunset light conditions. During these hours, the park presents an extremely colorful landscape. So even though I love black-and-white landscape photography, I found I made predominantly color images (but see the small B&W gallery below).
I found January to be an awesome time to visit Colorado National Monument. The week I was there, there were very few other visitors. Some evenings, in fact, I seemed to be the only person in the entire park – all 20,500+ acres of it. Yes, the January roads were a little icy in places, but even the icy roadways had their own beauty in the gorgeous sunset light. My SUV has all-wheel drive, but I still drove slowly. One has to go slow anyway, due to twisty roads, natural roadway obstacles, and wildlife in the roadway. Even so, you’ll want to drive slowly when here, to better take it all in (and to not miss any of the very-frequent stopping points to enjoy the views).
Yes, the photograph directly above is a little blurry. I took this from our moving car (as the passenger) just to illustrate the roadway. I considered stopping and setting up my tripod. But we were trying to make it to a specific viewpoint while the light was still good!
Finally, for the Black & White landscape photography fans, I did make some B&W images. Some of these are native B&W photographs captured with black-and-white profiles in the cameras I had with me. Others are Lightroom conversions.
I’ll be in the Grand Junction area again in 2026 and will plan to return to the park. So if you enjoyed this gallery, please check back later in the year for an additional new one!
