Earlier this summer my family spent several days in Fort Robinson, Nebraska for a huge family reunion on my wife’s side.

On the second-to-last day, I woke up extra early in order to get out for some sunrise and golden hour photos at the Red Cloud Buttes which were nearby to our cabins.

I had already scouted the route via Google Maps on my iPad, and so I had a pretty good idea of where I was going. So I woke up before the sunrise, brewed a cup of coffee, and hopped into my car to get going.

When I got to the trail head (which was a turn-off from the main highway out there), it was blocked by a chained-off gate. However, as I inspected it the gate I discovered that it wasn’t locked at all. The chains were just dangled around one another to help keep the two swinging gate doors closed.

So far as I could tell it was a public trail. So I opened up the gate and drove on through to get to McKenzie Pass.

I spent a couple of hours up there, walking around, shooting some photos and just sitting in the quiet with my coffee.

The weather didn’t quite cooperate with me, as, it was a very cloudy sunrise morning, so I didn’t really catch any epic shots. Though there was a moment where the clouds parted a bit, and the sun was shining onto one of the rock faces. It looked amazing and I tried to snap some photos, but none of them quite turned out the way I saw it in person. But that’s okay.

I’m glad I took the time to drive up there and was able to do some shooting. There are several more photos I took around Fort Robinson that I’ll share later this week.

All these photos were shot with my Leica Q, and then edited on my iPad Pro using Lightroom CC.