Where’s Home?

Forest, Plants
Tuesday, March 12th, 2024

Maple Forest

Where are my spruce and poplar forests? Where are my rolling prairies and jagged mountains? Where are the rose thorns that would constantly catch at my pants as I push through the underbrush? I have traded all these for…maple? Oak? Poison ivy?

I’m finding eastern Canada surprisingly less familiar than I thought I would. There’s more biodiversity and less familiar weather patterns. Rivers flow differently over more exposed rock. The birdsongs I know are mixed with many new ones, the squirrels no longer chatter at me – they buzz! I’m slowly learning the rhythm of this place, but it will be a long time until I feel as comfortable as I did in the west. I just finished leading my last scheduled trip in my old home (although I’m sure there will be more). So this is my challenge and this is my opportunity! I’ll be exploring this new place I’m in and as I start to understand it a little better I hope it will start to feel like home. And I hope I’ll be able to share just a little bit of that journey with you!

Special Places

Camping, Canoeing, Forest, Water, Wildlife
Tuesday, December 6th, 2022

The stretch of North Saskatchewan River between Rocky Mountain House and Drayton Valley is not spectacular. There are no mountains, no waterfalls, no deserts, no open vistas. It is a pretty standard river flowing through your average mixed boreal forest. I don’t know of any endangered species in the area. There is oil under the ground.

I first canoed this section of river in 2016, and I remember it being a peaceful and quiet trip. At one campsite we heard wolves howling nearby. This summer I led another trip down this section, and every day and every night we could hear the hum of oil wells and the rumble of trucks in the distance. There was no silence to be found. It was distressing to me and to the students on the trip – we didn’t get our peaceful experience of nature. It’s kind of selfish. I want peace and quiet, but Alberta workers need a livelyhood and the world needs oil and gas, especially with winter coming and the situation in Europe.

But it’s not just me that wants peace and quiet for a week on the river. There are many animals that call this place home. And home is getting stressful. Right now COP15, the UN Biodiversity Conference, is happening in Montreal. Wildlife populations worldwide have fallen 69% since 1970. That is terrifying. Is this encroachment of noise and development the cause? I don’t think we can draw a direct line – there are many things happening that affect the biosphere from climate change, to air pollution, to microplastics, and yes, noise pollution. But loss of habitat seems to be a primary driver of this decline and I can say for certain that the habitat around the North Saskatchewan River is less appealing to me than it was a short six years ago.

So how do we protect areas that are not spectacular? I can’t point to any reason that we should protect this area in particular. Except that I have been here and I love it. This place that started out as not very memorable has become special to me. My only hope for saving these wild or previously wild places is finding more people that find them special – people that value the things that we are losing. And people don’t value things they don’t experience in some way. So my small part in protecting these places is letting people experience them. And the more people that experience and value these things, the more chance we have of saving them. And maybe even go beyond saving to helping them. I want the future to be aspirational and not just trying to avoid one disaster after the next.

Here are a few more photos of this section of river. What’s your special place that is not spectacular?

Missing, In Action

Business, Landscape, Mountain
Friday, November 4th, 2022

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted any updates, but I have a big backlog of photos to work my way through and website updates in the works. I’ve been guiding hikes and canoe trips for many months and haven’t had any time to focus on the delivery side of my photography. That is now changing (for the next bit anyway – there’s a good chance I’ll go missing from here again, but rest assured that I’ll always be in action). I’ll just post the one photo today, but I’m working on updating the store and galleries in the next bit.

A waterfall in the alpine valley above Lake of the Falls, Alberta.

Attention

Business, Forest, Landscape, Winter
Tuesday, January 4th, 2022

Attention is contagious. I am more likely to pay attention to things you pay attention to. And so we have the power to affect what other people pay attention to, whether they agree or disagree with us.

This simple truth has helped me figure out my love/hate relationship with social media. I love directing people’s attention to nature – mostly I focus on the visual beauty with photography. But I also love the sounds of wind in the leaves and the birds singing. The smells of walking through wet autumn leaves or of pushing through a fir thicket. I love the feeling of the wind, sun, and rain. Social media lets me share bits of this. But at the same time as it lets me share, it takes the attention for itself. It is mixed in with a long feed of thousands of other companies and people all trying to get your attention, and all decided by algorithms that are designed to keep you engaged (often by infuriating you). It becomes a tool of advertising. It becomes a business opportunity for a multi-billion dollar corporation. It changes a wholesome thing into a competition – a measuring stick of your value against the value of others. It becomes a tiny bit of data on how long it grabs your attention so that they can get more effective at keeping your attention in the future. It takes an honest communication between people and shortens it, cheapens it, twists it just a tiny bit. It changes the context of an interaction, and context matters.

And so what is my response? Do I disengage? Delete my accounts? I often disappear from social media for months at a time. That is definitely not good for business, but it is good for my soul. But I often find myself coming back, because I like being able to draw people’s attention to nature. And I like the people I have connected with on these platforms. But I hate the platforms. So this is not a goodbye to social media, and it is also not a promise to keep posting. It is just a promise to try to engage with people honestly and deeply, when I can and in ways I am able to. And this rarely happens online for me.

One response is to guide trips in the wilderness. Being physically in a place surrounded by nature requires sustained attention and rewards it.

As a photographer, a self-serving response is physical prints. I recently installed a set of prints in a house and I got the rare (for me) chance to see my work in the context it will be. A physical print stays there. You can’t scroll to the next image. The place and the light keeps you company in the morning when you have coffee, and is still with you in the evening at supper. It becomes familiar and comforting. You actually have time to develop a response to an image and have coherent thoughts about that response.

So I want to draw your attention to nature. But I also want to draw your attention to yourself and your relationship with it, and that takes more time and attention than social media is willing to give you.

I’ve been reading “How to do Nothing” by Jenny Odell, which is fantastic and is prompting many thoughts, including this post.

Ptarmigan

Wildlife
Friday, November 6th, 2020

Here are some empty mountainsides.

If it wasn’t for the movement I probably wouldn’t have seen these ptarmigan right in front of me. The first one was in a group of five and they were VERY busy getting calories to keep themselves warm. The second was on the same trip, but at a lower elevation – this flock had not changed as many feathers to white yet. The third I saw when the chicks were taking dust baths: shaking their feathers and sending little plumes of dust up into the air.

Way up in the tundra near MacKay Lake they were much easier to see but we usually heard them first. Sometimes ptarmigan are silent, but when they’re talkative it’s great! I don’t have a recording, but here’s one from Cornell Lab of Ornithology: https://zcu.io/HODg

Fun fact: It takes ptarmigan about 3 weeks to change from their brown summer plumage to their white winter feathers.

Although they can fly, they often walk – in winter they need really good insulation on their feet. When it gets really cold, they will bury themselves in snow to stay warm. I’ve seen places where ptarmigan have dive-bombed the snow to bury themselves, have a nap right there, and then when they wake up, they poke their head up and walk away.

Colours After the Fire

Forest
Thursday, November 5th, 2020

Forest fires can cause so much damage, but they are also a natural way for forests to renew. There is beauty in this process too.

Here is a forest of black spruce near Kluane National Park in Yukon. That clump of needles at the top is one of the ways to tell black spruce from white spruce – they also tend to grow in much wetter soil. They look small here, but these could be quite old trees – they grow very slowly way up north.

Bad Weather, Good Light

Landscape, Mountain
Wednesday, October 14th, 2020

The worst weather is the best weather if you’re prepared! This was taken while hiking up to the notch (photos provide much needed breaks on steep climbs) on the Skyline Trail in Jasper. Curator Lake is in the foreground with Big Shovel Pass in the back of the spotlight.

Lichens and Glaciers

Abstract, Macro, Tundra
Thursday, October 8th, 2020

While taking photos for the Royal Alberta Museum, I learned that Lichenometry is a thing. I was photographing archaeological sites and the archaeologist I was working with told me that the time since a rock has been disturbed can be determined by the lichen growing on it.

I don’t know how to do that, but there’s a good chance this lichen has been growing here for 11,000 years. This photo was taken in the Northwest Territories, and that’s roughly when the Laurentide Ice Sheet would have receded in this area. If you look at the rock under the lichen, you can see striations (little grooves) and polish from a glacier grinding down the surface of the rock. You can also tell which direction the glacier was moving from the direction of the grooves.

Caribou in Jasper

Backpacking, Mountain, Wildlife
Sunday, October 4th, 2020

The Maligne Herd of caribou in Jasper is gone, and the rest of the caribou in the park are unlikely to be able to survive long-term. The Tonquin Valley herd still has around 45 individuals. I was lucky enough to be able to spend some in Tonquin Valley with some of the caribou. They are beautiful and curious creatures. The first time I saw them they got up and walked toward me to investigate. I sat down and watched them grazing and relaxing in the mountain meadow. Eventually other hikers came along the trail making a lot of noise. The caribou heard them from almost a kilometer away, got up and started to move away. The hikers were of course excited to see the caribou, and while loudly talking and rummaging through their gear to get out their camera equipment, they slowly chased the caribou across the valley until both the hikers and caribou disappeared over the horizon. I understand the excitement, but the lack of respect is frustrating. If an animal is moving away from you, please don’t follow it.

Moose Calf

Wildlife
Sunday, June 7th, 2020

I got to hang out with this little guy a couple days ago. At first I was nervously looking around for the mother. I was in a packraft – there’s no way I could outpace an angry mom in the water or on land. Eventually I saw some unconcerned but attentive ears twitching in my direction from an alder thicket. She was pretty chill, not even getting up, and the calf was alternating between curiously checking me out, munching on tempting greenery, and making circuits of the little island. It occasionally went back to check in with mom and then would come back down to the water to see me.