The Voyage Home, Also Butterflies

Which brings me to the story of picking up this clean looking SUV, which I like to call a truck. Mostly because I’ve always driven a “truck” of some variety, so old habits die hard I guess. The actual day to go down to Denver and pick it up kind of surprised me. Which meant that once I had the keys and the open road ahead of me I didn’t really have a plan. I knew I wanted to drive back up to Vail with a detour through Rocky Mountain National Park, but that was about it. Did I want to go for a short hike? I wasn’t really prepared for a big one. Turns out there are a lot of options for fun things to do in Colorado. So, I pulled off the highway and parked in the first easy parking lot I found. Doing some Googling to build my plan, I came across the Butterfly Pavilion in a couple searches. I had always been a bit curious about it, and then I looked up. Guess who’s parking lot I was in.

I figured why not, I found out you needed an appointment for a specific 2 hour block.  One was available in ten minutes!  I made my appointment and went to check out the Butterfly Pavilion.  I was blown away.  It turned out that it is a whole invertebrate zoo.  They didn’t just have Butterflies but as my photos show, spiders, insects, and even a whole room of aquatic critters.  Everyone but the butterflies were behind glass so they weren’t quite as easy to get good pictures of. I was really surprised by the variety, of course, I thought there were just butterflies.  The tarantulas in particular were fascinating, there were something like eight different species..  Unfortunately, the famous Rosie, the Giant Tarantula, wasn’t there when I was visiting for some reason.  

The next room was focused on a variety of aquatic invertebrate species, such as lobsters, crabs and starfish. There were maybe a half dozen aquariums or so, but due to the whole light bending thing of water and glass, it was super tough to get any photos to turn out. The room was fairly dark as well, which didn’t help. They did have a Mantis Shrimp in one tank by itself, because of their slightly murderous and explosive nature. At the time it was hiding back in a little cave, so I couldn't see it at all. I have always wanted to see one in person, they are some of the most colorful creatures on the planet. The only things I could really get a decent shot of were the rock lobsters and the giant hermit crabs.

Of course, the real star of the Butterfly Pavilion is the butterfly enclosure.  The entrance to which was covered with signs warning visitors to not step on any that happen to land on the walk ways.  It did ask that you try and avoid touching them as well.  That turned out to be much harder than I first thought it would be.  Once I walked through the “butterfly lock” like an air lock but different, I was blown away by the amount of small wings flying about.  Each colorful little flag flicking about erratically, filled the air.  They were on everything, walkways, handrails, all the plants, and thick in the air like clouds.  They would land on you without a second thought, sometimes hanging out for a minute or two at a time.  

The enclosure was a green house, which at the time was fully vented with fans all around and a much higher amount of humidity than outside.  I guess, if you’re going to build a habitat for a large variety of butterflies, a more forgiving humidity than the arid nature of Colorado is helpful.  It was a bit lighter in the enclosure than the more interior exhibits, but I ended up having to really turn up the ISO while capturing the movement of the butterflies.  I had to have the shutter speed pretty quick to be able to freeze the quick movement of the little fluttering insects.  I think I was fairly successful, but my auto focus found locking onto the butterflies almost impossible.  So, I ended up having to manually focus almost all the time when I use my Z6 with a Tamron 70-300mm lens.  It could be a thing with the adapter, or maybe the Tamron is demonstrating further that it's time to finally sell that kidney for the Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 S.  Just kidding, kind of, even thinking about it makes my wallet hurt.  

It's really the only time that I ran into any other performance issues with my Z6.  I think it might have been a combination of the heat, humidity and the target rich shooting environment that resulted in burning through both of my batteries and overheating the camera.  By overheating I mean the body physically got warm but it never gave me any warnings or anything telling me it was over worked.  By coincidence, my last battery was dead right about the same time as my time was up.  So I snagged an iced tea from the gift shop and headed back to the new ride.  Since I drained both batteries while at the pavilion it was the perfect time to take advantage of all the power features built into the 4Runner.  It has two standard 120 AC outlets, in addition to a couple round “lighter” outlets in the front.  I could plug one battery charger in and plug the camera in as well. 

By the time I got back to Rocky Mountain National Park I had both batteries back to full charge.  I decided to take US 36 all the way from Denver to Estes Park.  However I turned off my gps so it stopped nagging me while I got gas in Lyons, so I accidently turned down the wrong road out of town. It turned out to be a happy accident.  I was kind of getting a bit disheartened as I got closer to the park, as the dark clouds overhead just kept getting stormier.  The new ride was doing great with the wet roads though.  My detour took me by Saint Catherin’s Chapel of the Rock, which is a gorgeous little church tucked up in a little meadow at the foot of Longs Peak.  I drove right past it at first, thinking to myself that it was a spectacular sight but that it was too cloudy out.  On second thought though I ended up turning around a quarter mile or so further down the road.  

After finding a small roadside parking spot it spent the next half an hour or so, both trying not to trespass too much and still get a couple cool and dramatic shots of the church.  There was a set of possibly interesting compositions, but the light was super flat.  That is until I was walking back to the truck, not really thinking I had made anything particularly interesting.  Just then the sun broke through the cloud cover for just a couple seconds, and the few rays of light that shot though hit the church just right.  I couldn't believe my luck, maybe it was even divine intervention.   Naturally all these photo detours had really eaten though some time.