The Sunset We Almost Missed

A reminder of why we venture outdoors

A still from the very sunset I’m referring to

Somewhere on the hike back, I remember thinking: this was a mistake.

It was late, we were exhausted, and the trail from Andrews Bald felt less like a path and more like a punishment. Every step was uphill. The kind of uphill that doesn’t quit, slick roots, hidden stairs, aching legs. Will, our friend Chris, and I had been filming for weeks in the Great Smoky Mountains, living off grit, granola bars, and the kind of stubbornness that tells you to squeeze one more shot out of a day already too long. But this? This felt like it was probably a bit too much.

We’d started the evening at Clingmans Dome. The sky was thick with clouds, solid, colorless, uninspiring. There wouldn’t be a sunset to film tonight. So we pivoted, figuring we’d kill time with the 3.5-mile round trip hike to Andrews Bald. It was a spot we hadn’t captured yet, and the clouds gave us an excuse to experiment.

Andrews Bald is one of the anomalous high-elevation grassy balds scattered across Southern Appalachia. The Park Service tells us places like this were kept clear of vegetation by the grazing of megafauna like mastodons and wooly mammoths, and later bison, elk, and deer. Knowing that makes you stop in your tracks and wonder what this ridge must’ve looked like when it was still crawling with giants.

We filmed what felt like a throwaway timelapse. The light wasn’t great and we were tired. We satisfied ourselves with the fact that we’d just covered a rare and unique feature of the park and had nothing better to do anyway.

Then came the climb back.

That trail, wrapped tight in rhododendron tunnels and shaded by dense spruce and fir, was already dim before the sun began to set. The canopy made it darker still, the kind of darkness that tricks your eyes and slows your steps. First we joked about what a jackpot we’d gotten ourselves into climbing back up the steep ascent after such a long day. Then we just trudged. It felt like the trail would never end.

At last we neared the end and could see some light entering the end of the evergreen tunnel. As we reached the opening, we saw it. A wash of color and light, real light, causing the entire mountain to glow. It stopped us cold.

We scrambled, and I mean scrambled, yanking tripods from our packs, fumbling with lens caps and exposure settings, hands shaking from adrenaline, exhaustion, and cold. The sun had dropped beneath the cloud ceiling and lit the entire underside of the sky in an ember-red blaze. I’ve seen this sort of thing happen before, it’s a landscape photographers dream, but this? This was something else.

The wind was howling up there. Clingmans Dome in November is a far cry from the summer. We’d already camped through nights with temperatures dropping into the mid teens, but this felt colder still. The kind of cold that bites through jackets and stings your fingers before you can focus the lens. We tried to anchor the tripods but had to give up. The gusts were far too strong. So we held them, each of us standing like a sail against the wind, bracing against the elements while the cameras clicked away. It felt like I was on the bow of an Alaskan Coast Guard cutter speeding through an icy bay.

But there we stood, as the wind chased the thick clouds across the sky causing small fractures to open up. Shafts of sunset light broke through in real time, spotlighting the valleys and ridgelines below like some kind of heavenly stage production. It was a scene even Albert Bierstadt or Thomas Moran would have struggled to recreate.

And we almost missed it.

We almost missed one of the best sunsets I’ve ever seen because we thought the sky had closed up for the night. Because we were tired, and cold, and ready to call it.

But nature has its own ideas, and it doesn’t owe us anything.

Still, sometimes it gives.

That evening on Clingmans Dome, it gave us everything: color, motion, drama, and light that felt like it had been waiting behind the clouds just for us. And not because we worked hard for it, or deserved it. Just because we were there. Because we stepped outside when it would’ve been easier not to.

That’s the thing I come back to. If you go, really go, into the wild places with your eyes open and your heart in it, nature might just surprise you. It might test you first, sure. It might punish you with wind or rain or worse. But it also remembers how to reward.

And when it does, no camera in the world could ever fully capture what it feels like to stand in that kind of light.

But we try anyway. Because some moments are worth chasing, and some are just worth being there for.

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