A small but chromatically striking mountain watercolor — the most warm-toned of the mountain series, with the central peaks painted in vivid pink and orange-red rather than the cool blues and greens of the other Colorado landscapes. These pink mountains glow against the teal-green sky above them with an intensity that feels more at home with the abstract color works than the observational landscapes.
The sky is equally unusual: teal-green and dark blue-teal in the cloud masses, yellow at the horizon — colors that read as either a specific unusual weather event (the green sky before a tornado, the yellow light of an approaching storm) or as Sidney's characteristic decision to push observation toward feeling. The sky is how this mountain made him feel, not how the sky actually looked.
The foreground is a thin luminous green-yellow strip, the most naturalistic zone of the composition. Between foreground and mountains, a band of darker teal trees fills the middle distance with the dotted shorthand marks that populate so many of the landscapes.
At right, a separate geological mass — brown and ochre, textured, more conventionally rendered — balances the pink peaks and introduces a note of earth-colored realism against the heightened color of the central mountains. The composition is small but fully resolved — every zone handled with intention, no empty or unconsidered passage.