Boxing Day

What do you see from a nature preserve, like Barr Lake State Park, when you look towards downtown Denver, Colorado? Boxes of all shapes and sizes! Let’s take a look at some of those boxes, in particular, the Central Business District, or “Downtown,” Denver. And what is the relatively obscure holiday from England that follows Christmas and is used in the title? Boxing Day may be late this year, but Colorado HIGH SKY’s most obscure holiday reference (next to International Mountain Day) has a lot of ground to cover!

For a closer view of downtown Denver, I have visited the south side of Commerce City many times. While there are a lot of industrial properties in the area, the middle ground and the distance can work together in a photo composition to form an aesthetic appreciation of the city, against the background of majestic nature.

But to get really close to downtown, I visited an adjacent neighborhood in Denver, Capitol Hill (I had been contracted for a video shoot, but I also had to get some photos from the scene). Like any city with a diverse and varied commercial and residential base, there are many scenic spots—especially above “street” level. Colorado HIGH SKY may be one of the view places where you can see urban and rural photography in the same place!

With a closer look, the state capitol dome becomes clearly outlined by the boxes that surround it. While modern architecture has emphasized function over form, specifically the old saw, “Form follows function,” there is some variety to be found in the large number of boxes that make up commercial real estate’s architectural results.

To see the different sides of Downtown, I have also visited Littleton, a suburb to the south of the Central Business District. Even the suburbs have giant boxes that occasionally scrape the sky, but most stay closer to the ground.

Lakewood has its own version of “Downtown,” shown here from above, with the sunrise and buildings of Downtown Denver in the distance. From above Wright Park, the buildings next to the Federal Center that comprise the downtown area of Lakewood include hospitals, hotels and commercial buildings on the edge of Green Mountain.

From where I live in Lakewood, I have captured the sights of downtown many times, in many ways, and as shown here, on one occasion being engulfed by fog! The fog has to be very thick and heavy to make it to my home in arid Colorado, but I have been lucky to capture it from a distance.

Some of my favorite views of downtown can be found above Wheat Ridge. From one of the many parks in Wheat Ridge that I have visited, Lakeside Amusement Park can be seen in the shadows in front of the skyscrapers in the distance.

In a previous edition of the Colorado HIGH SKY newsletter, I have shared photos of Downtown taken from Cherry Creek State Park, to the southeast of Denver. But in this photo, it’s hard to tell the scale of the model airplane that “photobombed” my composition. The remote-control plane shown here is more than six feet long, with a wingspan to match.

And in a visit to East Reservoir (another subject of this newsletter) during August, the skyscrapers of Denver make a backdrop to a perching hawk at sunrise in the following photo. With the skyscrapers relegated to the background, this may have been an “unboxing” of its own: a true gift on a special day!

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