Jena and Taylor | Vail Engagement

Savannah Chandler Photography | Vail Wedding Photographer

For their engagement session, Jena and Taylor wanted to fly into Colorado from Texas and capture the feel of the mountains. We planned for a weekend in early June, however, this year has been absolutely nuts with the amount of snow still up on our mountains. Once we looked up the road conditions for our original spot of Shrine Pass and saw that there was still nearly FIVE FEET of snow, we postponed until mind July. Fast forward roughly 6 weeks – we looked up the road to Shrine Pass to photograph on July 13… it was still closed. Washout. All the snow we got is wrecking havoc on our high mountain roads. Doing what I love to do – I got in my car and went around scouting for a fantastic mountain location. Boy oh boy am I glad that Shrine was closed ;). Just outside of Vail, I found this amazing trail that overlooks the entire Gore mountain range, and was covered in wildflowers. Flowers taller than me. Fields of columbines. Lupines knee high. The snow had also brought about amazing flowers after the massive melt.

On the evening of our session, I met Jena and Taylor up at the trailhead to start hiking for our session. We hiked up for roughly a mile, and tried to duck in and out of the trees for the oncoming rain and storms. The weather report looked somewhat iffy, but not awful. You could clearly see in the sky that somewhere to the West, the rain was pouring down. Just our luck, we were right on the outskirts of the storm and only experienced tiny stints of rain on and off.

We began up on the mountain, looking to the Gore Mountain range with flowers lining the trail. There was no bad view in any direction – we made our way down the mountain photographing as we went. I knew there was a field of tall wildflowers (which I can NOT seem to find the name of, let me know if you can identify them!), we stopped in the field before heading fully down the mountain for “sunset”. They skies were still mostly dark, but I knew I still wanted to capture what little color was in the sky in the sweeping field near the base of the trail. I brought my dad to act as a “voice activated lightstand”, allowing me to light Jena and Taylor against the dark skies and booming mountains.

I believe that I have now found what is a new favorite photo location. I’m super excited to go back in the fall as well to see all the aspens and ground foliage line the mountains with gold.

Thank you Jena and Taylor for adventuring with me – even if we had to be super spontaneous and we had to change outfits 3 times 😉