Passo Gardena is a high mountain pass elevation; 7008 feet in the Italian Dolomites

Passo Gardena is a high mountain pass elevation; 7008 feet in the Italian Dolomites, connecting Sëlva in the Val Gardena on the west side with Corvara in the Val Badia. The mountains here are part of the Sella group. I had done some scouting here earlier in the afternoon and couldn't surely decide what I wanted for a foreground; big sheets of snow still leftover or rare patch of flowers that were beginning to finally bloom; I clearly decided to go with the latter. I also went back and forth about cloning out the car down there (my rental!), but thought it gave a decent sense of scale here, so I kept it. It might wind up going back and axing it, though. I wanted to stick around to shoot some stars after nightfall, but temperatures rapidly dropped below freezing my hands and feet were numb at the end of this photograph and I was sadly not equipped to spend hours out in that kind of weather. Source: Chris Lazzery