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Matt Payne
Matt Payne is a landscape photographer and mountain climber from Durango, Colorado. He’s the host of the weekly landscape photography podcast, “F-Stop Collaborate and Listen,” co-founder of the Nature First Photography Alliance, and co-founder of the Natural Landscape Photography Awards. He lives with his wife, Angela, his son Quinn, and his four cats, Juju, Chara, Arrow, and Vestal.
This week, I had the misfortune of having one of my most unique photographs go viral in a Facebook Group about Colorado Photography. I say misfortune because this explosion in views came with a litany of comments from viewers asking me to provide the exact location of the photograph. Having spent some time at this particular location, I'm keenly aware that it lacks the infrastructure that would need to accompany a mass influx of visitation, so I kept my lips sealed and simply stated that the image was captured in Colorado. This angered a lot of people for a variety of reasons, which we will expand on later in this article; however, I need to explain why so many photographers are keeping location information close to the vest.
This photograph sparked outrage in a Facebook Photography Group because I refused to tell everyone where it was captured.
To paint a picture for you, I need to take you back to 2015. It was the very first time I ever visited what is now known as the most popular alpine destination in Colorado - Ice Lakes Basin. It was a pristine August weekend and my friend Ryan and I wanted to backpack into the basin so that I could climb Vermillion Peak nearby while we both engaged in some landscape photography. We had known about the location's potential for great photography through our meticulous research and were excited to go. Needless to say, we were both able to capture some great images and had a great time. We saw a total of four other people the entire weekend. I was so elated about my experience that I wrote an article about it for a now defunct magazine called the San Juans Mountain Journal. A friend of a friend and local resident of Ophir, Colorado, disparaged me for sharing information about this special place, which I didn't understand at the time. I thought, "What is the harm in sharing this location with other outdoor enthusiasts?"
One of my first photographs from Ice Lake Basin, a beautiful place that has become overcome with visitation thanks to Geotagging on social media
Negative Impacts on Locations from Geotagging and Location Sharing in Photography
Fast forward to 2016 and beyond and it was clear to me that the word was out about this amazing place thanks to the proliferation of Instagram and Geotagging. Several huge and popular accounts with over a million followers had created some viral videos of Ice Lake Basin and the impact was extreme. The basin went from seeing 10-20 visitors a week to over 1,200 a day in a matter of a year. I returned in 2016 to find it packed with crowds of people, which transformed the location from a pristine nature experience filled with peace, solace, and solitude to one of noise, trash, and crowds of people. While this might not be a big deal for some places, it is a huge deal for a place like Ice Lake Basin. This location is above the tree line, where the tundra is quite sensitive to the impact of foot traffic. There is only a short vegetation growing season of approximately 50 to 60 days. Due to the extreme climate and limited opportunities for plant growth, this ecosystem is extremely sensitive to disturbance. Even modest human activity can result in many negative impacts on the ecosystem. Which is exactly what happened. Human faeces accumulated at the lake. Social trails exploded. Now a permit system is being implemented which will limit access, which is counter to what all of the anti-gatekeeping folks hate - more on that later.