On Friday, Telluride reported another 10 inches. The webcams showed no sign of the snow letting up and the brunt of the storm wasn’t supposed to arrive until Saturday night. Game on. The previous evening, I’d enlisted my friend and photographer Alex Witkowicz to make the trip. After a full day in the office, we hit the road. Our projected arrival was well after 2 a.m. Red Bull would be involved.

It’s after midnight on pitch-black mountain roads that roads trips become vision quests. Ours fully kicked in at 1:17 a.m. on Saturday morning as we sped over the Dallas Divide south of Montrose, hit a patch of black ice, narrowly missed rolling my truck into a sketchy ditch, and slammed into the opposing snow bank none the worse for wear aside from some now-necessary alignment work.

We parked ‘er in a pull-off shortly after our near death experience, unrolled our sleeping bags, packed it into the bed of my truck, and tried to grab some sleep on a night that was substantially colder than my 0-degree mummy could handle. “Don’t freeze,” I thought. “Tomorrow will be all time.”