A Sunday Morning in Georgetown

Family photographs, early signs of fall, and a short walk through a Colorado mountain town.

Words and photographs by Larry George II

There are certain places that become markers of time without you really intending them to.

Guanella Pass is one of those places for me and my family.

When my wife and I first moved to Colorado, we'd barely been here a week or two before people started telling us about it.

You have to drive Guanella Pass.

You moved here at the perfect time.

You have to see the leaves.

So we went.

First Trip to Georgetown, October 2022

Four years later, I found myself making that drive again. This time, there were three of us.

We woke up early and headed toward the mountains hoping to beat some of the crowds. The original plan was simple: take our fall family photos.

The leaves weren't quite there yet.

There were little patches of yellow scattered among all the green, a preview of what's coming more than the full fall display we'd imagined. But the morning was quiet, the weather cooperated, and we had enough time to slow down.

That was really all we needed.

Taking our family photos has become its own strange little production.

There's no photographer standing behind the camera.

I find a spot, set up the tripod, frame everything, turn on interval shooting and run back into the picture. Then we try to forget that a camera is taking a photograph of us every few seconds.

Somewhere in that process, eventually, we get something real.

And I love that these photographs are self-portraits in the truest sense.

I'm not only in them. I made them.

Years from now, my daughter won't necessarily know about the tripod just outside the frame or how many times I ran back and forth from the camera. She won't know which photograph happened right before someone needed a snack or which one required convincing her to stand still for just a few more seconds.

She'll just see us. Together, in the mountains, on a Sunday morning.

Down the Mountain

Once we finished taking pictures, we headed into Georgetown.

Our first stop wasn't particularly historic or photogenic.

It was the playground.

And for a while, the camera wasn't the point.

We climbed around the play structure with our daughter, went down the slides and let her dictate what happened next. One of the things I'm learning about family outings is that the places adults consider stops along the way are sometimes the entire destination for a kid.

Eventually, we started walking.

The park isn't far from the older part of Georgetown, so what began as a short walk to “take a look at downtown” turned into the part of the morning that caught my attention in a different way.

I noticed the buildings, the signs, the porches and windows. I noticed the history on the structures that date this town to before Colorado was even a state.

I know a place has me when I stop simply looking at what's in front of me and start wondering about it.

Who built this?

What did this street look like a hundred years ago?

What happened inside that building?

What has disappeared?

What somehow survived?

I didn't have answers to most of those questions that morning nor did I have the time to explore as deeply as I wanted. I just had a camera.

The Water Running Through It

Then there was the water.

It cuts through town almost casually, tucked between buildings, roads and pieces of Georgetown's history.

I kept finding compositions around it.

There's something I enjoy about places where the landscape hasn't been completely separated from the town built on top of it. The mountains are still there behind the buildings. The water still moves through the middle. The trees still tell you what season is coming.

Georgetown feels built within its surroundings rather than completely apart from them.

I could have kept walking, exploring, and capturing what I saw.

That's one of the problems with carrying a camera. A short walk can very quickly become let me see what's around this corner.

And then the next one. And the next one.

But we have a toddler.

And toddlers have schedules.

Before Nap Time

We’d been up pretty early and both my girls were getting restless so we turned around.

There was no dramatic ending to the morning. No sunset over the mountains. No incredible discovery waiting at the end of the street.

We just needed to get home for nap time. And I think that's partly why I wanted to remember this day.

This is what I love doing on weekends.

Spending time with my family. Going somewhere that means something to us. Making photographs. Wandering through an old place and wondering about the people who were there before me. Watching my daughter experience somewhere new.

Then getting back in the car and going home.

Four years ago, Guanella Pass was part of our introduction to Colorado.

This time, we came back with our daughter, a tripod and a few yellow leaves beginning to appear in the mountains.

Maybe that's what makes a place special.

Not simply that you remember going there.

But that, every once in a while, you get to return as a slightly different version of yourself.

Georgetown & Guanella Pass, Colorado — September 2026