A snowy mountain looms over a street, trees, and houses in peachy clouds

Sunrise, Sunset

A remarkably color-warm dawn and dusk on this day, the kind that casts the world in a glow that makes your everyday streets look fantastical, the setting for something momentous.

It is funny to think that not long ago Mount Timpanogos was unnamed, just another range of peaks surrounding our haven. The introduction to Jared Farmer's On Zion's Mount tells us it was a very successful BYU promotional campaign ~1910 that established the landmark partly by inventing an Indian legend. The range took the name of the displaced Timpanogos people who had lived here in the wetlands around Timpanogos Lake (now Utah Lake) and Timpanogos River (now Provo River) before they were colonized and killed, and displaced them again symbolically up into the mountains, marginalized, further from local consciousness, an erasure of the horrific injustice.

8 January 2025

Provo, Utah

42mm, f/5.6, 1/200s, ISO 640

Sony a6300 with 16-50mm f/3.5-5.6 lens

The upper half of a mountain bathed in sunset light, pinky clouds above, and in the foreground powerlines running forward.

I remember the Timpanogos people's displacement when I admire the mountain, beautiful and familiar to me, a guardian of the place I call home...ahh, multi-faceted, ever-changing, and yet so solid mountains, teach us to heal. (This photo is from sunset on the same day.)

An orange and black lichen speckled light grey rock with dry grasses sticking out, the sky above with the waxing moon in it.

I had to bighorn sheep around a bit to get a view of Timpanogos from where I was, and that's how I found this lichen-speckled rock.

Whispy clouds out west catch bright orange sunset light in a sky going from yellow to turquoise to blue.

I ran back up the mountainside to see sunset unobstructed by powerlines. I thought the yellow-turquoise-blue gradient that evening was particularly nice. (I have a funny relationship to photography: I want my priority to be being present with my experience of the world, but then there is something that thrills me in a playful way about running around attempting to preserve something of the emotion of it.)

Evening yellow to purple to blue sky with some grey clouds.

There's a stage of dusk, here, where the sky can turn purple. Can that happen anywhere? I don't remember seeing this growing up in Minnesota. In Spain, I remember sunsets and sunrises can have a lot of green in them.

The mountainside seems to glow a warm light in the late dusk, snowy mountains in the distance, some city lights.

There were some magical minutes where all the land seemed to emanate a warm light, the mountainsides in particular glowed. Notice the white spot above snowy Mount Timpanogos, light reflecting off the snow brightening the clouds.

In the night clouds still catch some of the orange glow of sunset over a church.

Here's what I think of as a last stage of sunset, one that reminds me of dying embers where sunset colors fade back in. These ones glowed a good while.