Spotlight, Center Stage

A few hundred feet above Marble, Colorado, at 8,000 feet (which hosts a really good barbecue restaurant, by the way), this solitary cottonwood, glowing as if plugged into the electrical grid, will shed its luminescence in a few days. Winter happens.

Aspen and cottonwoods are willows, both in the same family of plants, but it was still a surprise to find this one happily growing amongst its leafless cousins quite a ways up-mountain from its usual riparian habitat.