Mountain of the Sun - Sherri Mabe Images

“No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied – it speaks in silence to the very core of your being.”

— Ansel Adams

The Pikes Peak granite is a 1.08 billion year old widespread geologic formation found in the central part of the Front Range of Colorado. It is a coarse-grained pink to light red syenogranite with minor gray monzogranite, and it has a distinctive brick-red appearance where it outcrops. The granite gets its name from the 14,115-foot Pikes Peak mountain, which is made up almost entirely of this rock.

Pikes Peak, it was known as Tavá Kaa-vi — the Sun Mountain. The mountain was named such by the indigenous Nuche tribe, a Numic-speaking people (Uto-Aztecan) known today as the Ute. It is the first Colorado 14er to have the sun hit its peak at dawn.

In 1893, at the age of 33, Bates, an English professor at Wellesley College, had taken a train trip to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to teach a short summer school session at Colorado College. Several of the sights on her trip inspired her, and they found their way into her poem, including the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the “White City” with its promise of the future contained within its gleaming white buildings; the wheat fields of America’s heartland Kansas, through which her train was riding on July 16; and the majestic view of the Great Plains from high atop Pikes Peak

America the Beautiful, was written just down the road from my home, by Katharine Lee Bates…so each day I spy “for purple mountain majesties” from my west window. Bates originally wrote the words as a poem, “Pikes Peak”, first published in the Fourth of July edition of the church periodical The Congregationalist in 1895.

On the pinnacle of that mountain, the words of the poem started to come to her, and she wrote them down upon returning to her hotel room at the original Antlers Hotel. The poem was initially published two years later in The Congregationalist to commemorate the Fourth of July. It quickly caught the public’s fancy. Amended versions were published in 1904 and 1911.

Via Wikipedia

Tava, April 2021

”The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.”

― Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

Some of us are ocean folks and others mountain people. I grew up along the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, so they are my one true thing, my true north, my touchstone. The paradox is my struggle to photograph them…

Sherri Mabe June 26, 2024

Digital Infrared Photography