For the 250th week of the Moving Postcard web series, Scott and I visited the Garden of the Gods Park in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The park, which is free to the public, is a National Natural Landmark featuring stunning red, pink and white sandstone, conglomerate and limestone rocks that have been pushed from a horizontal to a vertical position to create spires, towers and huge yet skinny walls. As if that wasn’t visual enough, the park’s backdrop is Pikes Peak, the tallest mountain of the southern Rocky Mountains.
Besides all the photo ops, the park also offers hiking trails and rock climbing… and lots and lots of tourists. I have not seen so many people in nature since the last time I was in Central Park on a summer day.
Unfortunately, I got hit by a classic migraine while at Garden of the Gods, causing my vision to be severely impaired. So I had to stop filming and taking photos, and we had to cut our visit short. In the end, we didn’t get to see all the famous rocks or take the time to capture just the right angle of the ones we did see. I was particularly sad not to have seen Pikes Peak through the space in-between the Siamese Twins rocks. But in this video, you still get to see Balanced Rock, Cathedral Spires, Grey Rock, Kissing Camels, Sentinel Spires, Sleeping Giant, Three Graces and White Rock and probably a few more from afar that I couldn’t identify.
In case you’re wondering where the name “Garden of the Gods” comes from… it has nothing to do with being a Native American spiritual place, as I had suspected, but with two surveyors who in 1859 looked upon the area and one stated that it would make a great place for a beer garden, while the other one supposedly said: “Beer Garden! Why it is a fit place for the gods to assemble. We will call it the Garden of the Gods.”
The song in this video is called “Cryin’ In My Beer” and was written and performed by Jason Shaw, who made this song available via the CC BY 3.0 license. Thank you, Jason!
… and a huge THANK YOU to all of you have watched all 250 episodes (plus some bonus videos) or just this video today. Thank you for all your comments, sharing of videos, and encouragement. It’s a real pleasure to share a new video with you every week.
You can look at more photos from this video shoot on my personal blog: Photos from the Garden of the Gods (Colorado) and on my photography website: LuciWest.com.
You can purchase a print of this photo here on my photography website.
