Last fall I was staying in Red Wing when I got up early to go for a run on the iconic Barn Bluff towering over the river city. The hill wasn't far from our hotel and seemed like a good place to watch the sun come up.
When I got to the top, the light was still dim, but I was surprised to find a woman there, silhouetted against the morning sky at the eastern overlook. She had a tripod and a camera pointed at the horizon.
Her name was Ellen Lentsch, a 44-year-old aspiring photographer, and it was her 274th consecutive sunrise on the bluff. She had 93 more before she would accomplish her goal: To photograph the sunrise from that same point every day for a year. Her idea was to put them together to be able to see the sun moving across the sky and back again. She also wanted to capture the moment in all its colors and moods and to cast a familiar sight in a new light.
"The world around us," she says, "we take it for granted. But if we pause a moment and look around, there's so much beauty right in our own backyard. I want people to see that. I want people to realize this is not an ugly world."
Lentsch had only been taking pictures for a few years. She started after she and her husband, Jerry, joined a travel club in 2012, going for the first time to places like Costa Rica, Mexico and Hawaii, and opening her own eyes to beautiful places beyond her backyard. As a child, she had moved around according to where her father (a programmer for computer-maker Sperry Univac) was posted: California, Arizona or Canada. But as an adult, she'd lived most of her life in the Twin Cities and Cannon Falls area, working a variety of jobs at factories and other places.
Once Lentsch started traveling, however, she became interested in travel writing and photography. She bought a good camera, took it off auto and started learning how to use it. Soon she realized she needed a big project to help focus her work. On social media, she saw a time-lapse of the sun tracing a figure eight through the sky. That was something she'd never seen before, and it made the daily path of the sun seem strange and new. She wanted to create something like that, and she knew it had to do with sunrises. A friend suggested Barn Bluff (now officially also known by its Mdewakanton Dakota name He Mni Can). Lentsch had watched fireworks and gone on wildflower walks there, and she knew that was the place.
In 2015, she made several attempts, but overslept, or had to leave town, or was interrupted by some kind of distraction. Then on the last night in December 2015, she set out everything she would need to start the next day. In the morning she got up at 4 a.m. but still found herself scrambling, running around, wondering what she'd forgotten. Finally she got to her car, drove 17 miles to the bluff and humped all her gear up the hill, which took her 40 minutes in the snow. She made it, took her shots, and came back down.
The next day, she went back, climbed the hill in the dark, then climbed back down, nearly a mile each way. Again the next day. And the next. Every day, the shoot took a full three hours. Lentsch worked second shift at a company that engraved metal plaques. Sometimes she would get home at 2 a.m., sleep an hour, then hurry off to the hill.