Day 3: Moraine Lake

Sunday, September 24, we decided to take the shuttle to Moraine Lake, in spite of having to wait in line for about 1 hour. It was a partly cloudy day, again cold in the morning, but pleasantly warm later on in the day.

The Moraine Lake area is a very popular destination for tourists in Banff/Lake Louise. There are a number of trails that start there. The most popular in Fall is the Larch Valley/Sentinel Pass trail, about 12 km return, total elevation gain 732 m. We decided to ignore the crowd and hike it anyway. The trail starts at Moraine Lake with a series of forested switchbacks for about 2 kms. At the top there is a large area full with larches, all of them in peak colour when we were there.

It isn’t easy to make pictures of larches, at least for me. They are a funny tree. They are scraggly, almost ungainly looking, but just glow with colour. I couldn’t figure out how to do the feel of the place justice. So many trees! So much colour! What to do with it. I suspect it will take a few years of experimentation to figure out how to make beautiful images of larches.

The trail continues with sparser and smaller larches, to a rocky place, where you can see Sentinel Pass ahead. There are also a number of small lakes called Minestimma Lakes.

The mountains around are gorgeous! Harsh looking, yes, rocky, brown/gold, pewter, a bit of snow:

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We had lunch at the topmost and largest of the pools. We decided not to go up Sentinel Pass, but lounge around the lake for a while on the warm rocks. This is Sentinel Pass:

Laura decided to take a nap; I walked around to the far side of the small lake. From there, looking back over where we had hiked up, I could see the Valley of the Ten Peaks, which we could also see from the Valley of the Larches before. The peaks reflecting in Lake Minestimma made for a surreal scene:

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After a while we returned to Lake Moraine, same route as going up. The larches and the peaks were, if anything, even more beautiful than before:

That evening we went out for pizza at Lake Louise Village. It was a great day overall!

Day 2: Lake Louise

On Saturday, September 23, 2017, Laura and I hiked in the Lake Louise area. Lake Louise is a small hamlet with a big ski resort, a big campground, and many hotels and motels including the famous Lake Louise Chateau, seen here in the distance from the Plain of Six Glaciers trail:

We hiked all day. It was cloudy with sunny breaks, quite cool in the morning, but beautiful for hiking! There are a number of trails that start at Lake Louise. We first took the trail to Lake Agnes and the teahouse there. Lake Agnes is medium in size, quite green, with steep mountains on three sides. There are larches close to the lake and going up the mountainsides. We had hot chocolate at the teahouse.

Then we went around the lake, on the side with the larches in the picture above, and up the Big Beehive trail. This is a closeup of sun-sparkles on Lake Agnes:

There were numerous larches by the trail. There also was a bit of snow/ice left, that made some of the switchbacks slippery.

From there we hiked down the other side of Beehive, towards the Plain of Six Glaciers trail. This trail goes up to another teahouse, from where you can hike another couple kms to view Victoria Glacier close up. It is a rather arid landscape, harsh, dry looking to my BC eyes, but spectacular:

We hiked as far up as we could, and were at a place where we could see Upper Victoria Glacier above us and Lower Victoria Glacier below us. At the top of a cleft where Upper Victoria winds down towards the lower part of the glacier is an alpine cabin, which looks sort of out of place among all that ice and those tall, pointy, rocky mountains:

Glaciers closeup are quite dirty. They have dust and rocks and other debris on the surface, and don’t look white and pure like they do from a distance:

Still, the shapes and colours are beautiful!

We had to hurry back to Lake Louise to catch the last bus back down the mountain. We almost ran downhill, and made it! We ended up hiking more than 20 kms total, up and down, over rocks, ice, snow, and were quite worn out at the end of the day, but it was worth it.

The Canadian Rockies in Fall

This past week one of my daughters and I spent a week camping and photographing the Fall colours in Banff and Yoho National Parks. We had cold nights, but absolutely beautiful days! The mountains had a bit of new snow. The larches in both parks were at their prime, the aspen almost at prime.

The first day we drove through Revelstoke and Glacier Parks, to Lake Louise. The second and third days we hiked and photographed in the Lake Louise and Moraine Lake areas. The fourth day we made our way to the Lake O’Hara area of Yoho, were we stayed for a total of three days. The last day we spent in Banff proper. Then it was back home, where the trees are just now coming into their full Fall glory.

I don’t often do black and white, but the picture above is a view of the mountains in Glacier Park, on our way East. I thought black and white was appropriate for the scene. Enjoy!

VISION Issue 14

The January 2015 Issue of VISION Magazine is about my photography. The magazine is published by Vision Explorers.

This is a picture of the cover of the magazine:

New work – “ponderosa” and “looking out, looking in”

“ponderosa”

“looking out, looking in”

New Work: “fireworks”

fireworks

Dandelion seed pod, shot handheld (Nikon D7000), fully open macro lens (Sigma 150mm f/2.8), very close-up

New WorkKo

The wildflowers are starting to show. The first “showy” wildflowers to come up every year in my area are the glacier lilies. Here’s a photo of one of them:

new picture – consequences

I am thinking of Japan while making this picture. I am thinking of the nuclear disaster and the far reaching consequences for the people of Japan, and for the whole world. Like tendrils, like dust that spreads, the consequences, scary and sad at the same time.