An Adirondack dream come true: Pursuing a yearlong quest to photograph each day’s sunrise

For 100 days and counting, the now-retired founder of Champlain Area Trails has greeted the sunrise with a camera in hand

By Tim Rowland

When the first ray of sunshine pierces the morning gray over ridge, water or wood, Chris Maron will be there, pointing his camera phone to the east. He was yesterday, is today and will be tomorrow.

Like paparazzi stalking the sky’s most famous star, Maron, for somewhere around 100 days now, has been standing behind the velvet rope of dawn to photograph the sunrise from hill and dale. It is a project he first thought of doing last year, before he retired as executive director of the Westport-based Champlain Area Trails.

“I thought it would be a good way to retire, maybe do it as a fundraiser,” he said on a recent hike. His long strides carried him up a 2,000-foot peaklette in the town of Jay in the murky pre-dawn light.

But the obligations of the office as he wrapped up his past 15 years of work proved incompatible with a hard-and-fast daybreak routine. 

So the project was pushed to 2025. The goal is to shoot the sunrise every day of the year, not as a fundraiser now, but as a meaningful way to connect with nature every morning. Maron said there have been days when a warm bed felt a lot more appealing than getting up and out and finding a random place from where to shoot. But the sun waits for no man.

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Nor, for him, is a rocking chair a viable retirement option. He founded CATS in 2009, and built the organization over the years from 10 miles of trail to over 100. Slowing down in retirement does not seem to be a concept for Maron. Still blessed with a youthful face and an unfair amount of energy at age 76, Maron has become immersed in the project, finding new venues from which to shoot, and posting results on social media.

Conditions have improved, of course. March is no longer the frozen ice box of January, but daybreak is coming earlier. Maron said sometimes he plans his venue in advance, sometimes not.

“This is the first time I’ve really been inside the Adirondack mountains to take pictures,” he said. “I’ve always been in the Champlain Valley, so it’s sort of fun to get over here and see the different views of mountain peaks.”

As the sky brightens, on our Jay hike, it becomes a bit of a race to get to an open vantage point before the sun makes an appearance. The climb is moderately steep, but the view is promising — a wide, 180-degree view of the eastern Adirondacks from Poke-o-Moonshine in the north to the Soda Range in the south.

We beat the sun to the spot by about 10 minutes. Maron shoots pictures — dozens of them — before, during and after the sun crests the horizon. The illuminating thing has been how often the scene can change. “Every second is a different picture,” he said. “I take a lot of pictures, and usually I don’t know the best ones until I get them home and look at them.”

Indeed, it’s a bit like a slow-motion light show at a concert. Mountains are brightly lit up by the sun, then fade back into shadow. Colors change. A band of clouds low in the east go from gray to pink to red to orange to yellow and back to gray again. The pines on our ridge glowed in a creamy, yellow light, and the ice that was still covering open rock sparkled like diamonds. 

Maron said he’s not always that lucky. But he still takes photos of daybreak, or an approximation thereof, when clouds are thick, as they were in the last weekend in March when a flock of birds rose from the water adding visual interest. Sometimes it’s deer, other times it’s ice fishermen. 

Sometimes it’s the simple stillness of snow on a bough of pine. No matter the weather, there’s always something going on at dawn.
To view Maron’s sunrise collection, follow @chris_jurgen_maron on Instagram or find him on Facebook.

Photo at top: A recent vibrant sunrise on Lake Champlain. Photo courtesy of Chris Maron