I predicted reasonably good chance of a beautiful sunrise for Sunday morning and I had nothing better to do so I planned on being at a specific overlook out at the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge for the pre-sunrise color show. I have been to this overlook many times before and tried to capture nice sunrises here and I was hoping that this would be my day. Sunrise would be at about 7:11 AM and I set my alarm for 5:30 AM to give myself time to get some coffee and head out. When I got up and looked outside that morning, I could see some high clouds near the moon, so everything looked like it might come together.

I got to the parking lot at the refuge and could see the beginnings of color in the sky. I worried I was going to be late as it would take me a good 20 minutes to hike up to the overlook I was targeting. So, I kind of panicked and went down the path to the little waterfall instead so I could get something. I set up the tripod and took a few groups of bracketed photos for HDR merges. There was some color in those clouds but it began to fade and I figured that was all I was going to get. I packed up and headed up the trail to get some hiking in.

I must be rusty at this because that was just the first round of predawn color. There is often a small bit of color about 25-30 minutes before sunrise if the clouds are just right followed by much more color about 10 minutes before sunrise. I wasn’t thinking about this and I just headed up the trail figuring I missed a nice sunrise. Boy was I wrong. Getting to the top of the ridge, shown in the distance in the above photo, I was greeted with this:

The real sunrise color had arrived and I was out of position. I was at least a 5 minute quick hike from my targeted overlook and the color would probably be gone by the time I got there. So I tried to make the best of it and ran over to a service road that runs through the trees in to the valley to the East. I took the following handheld and was able to bring up the shadows nicely enough in post.

Nice, I suppose, but it wasn’t what I had planned. And I had a good plan, but I just didn’t stick to it. Had I focused on hiking out to my viewpoint I would have gotten all the glorious color there instead of running around panicking and shooting sunrises handheld like some sort of caveman.

I did make it to my overlook and the sun had already cleared the horizon. It was still pretty with lots of warm color, but I had really wanted to work this valley with the color in the sky.

I stuck around for a while to see if the sun would get into those clouds and do anything special. It didn’t really as all that accomplished was blocking all of the golden hour sunlight. So, I packed up and continued my warm hike. By this time several others had arrived to get in their early morning exercise.

That was our one or two days of high clouds for a while, back to clear skies and hot days. One day I will get a perfect sunrise out here, if I can make a good plan and follow it.