Canadian Rockies: Epilogue and Conclusions

The flight home was uneventful, though as some of you know, the aftermath of the return was anything but.

I feel that I'm bragging when I declare the trip to be a success. I had several goals for the trip:

1. To see how much skill loss I had suffered from 8 years of neglecting my photography hobby.
   
2. To do a solo trip, something I had not done for 10 years, since the second half of the New England bike trip.
   
3. To get used to shooting in digital format, and learn what differences in my work style and work flow I had to make in order to best take advantage of the digital medium.
   

The answer to #1 was that I did not suffer any apparent skill loss. This really surprised me. My brother, who's normally very critical of my work said, "This is the best shoot you've done since you acquired the 5D2." While I've had other serious shoots (for instance in Australia), none of them came close to producing this much good work. I did get rusty in a few areas: I was slow at first with the tripod and I'm still ham-fisted when it comes to my filter rings. One of my filters has a small chip in an unimportant area as a result. But that improved dramatically during the trip. At one point one of the hikers I met said, "Did you notice how fast he set that up and tore that down?" The other part of it is that during the past 8 years, I've made myself a better outdoors person. I'm more comfortable now hiking in the dark. I'm more able to anticipate where the light will be, and have better hunches about the weather. That's happened so slowly that I never even noticed or paid attention to it, but it shows up in the photos I make.

Traveling solo turned out to be great for me. There was no one to second guess me or whine about yet another 6:00am start. OK, I whined to myself a little bit. That contributed to better photos as well, since not being screamed at for an early start makes me more willing to start early. I met so many people, and made so many new friends. Janice and I were discussing this and we agreed that the trick is to be open to new experiences and new people. If she had not waited for me and smiled, we wouldn't have had company for the day, and it would have been our loss. Women in particular have to be more careful when solo, but when I asked Eungshin why she accepted my invite to chat, she said, "You were obviously shooting with expensive equipment and you knew how to use it. I decided then that you couldn't be dangerous!" So being a photographer does help in your social life (it's usually a hindrance as girlfriends and wives get impatient with you), just not in any way I would have imagined. In any case, I rediscovered that meeting and talking to strangers was something I wasn't shy about, and that was a big confidence builder. Every time I proposed a trip, someone would ask me, "Would you really have gone alone if no one wanted to go with you?" And now I can truly say the answer is "Yes. I've done so recently, and thoroughly enjoyed it!" In fact, I suspect that for nature photography I really have no choice but to do solo trips or trips with other photographers. There is no easy way to get quality time otherwise.

An intriguing idea that occurred to me would be to travel with another photographer, go for morning and evening shoots, and swap memory cards for post-processing/culling and selection. That's a great way to eliminate the photo-shooter's bias, which is to include shots that had a lot of work put into them even if they aren't as good. Plus, I always like seeing what other photographers do to pictures, and seeing how someone else crops or manipulates your image has got to be educational no matter what. For this, of course, you couldn't leave your laptop at home like I did!

I've written about the digital transition before in two articles: about "cheap film" and no need for 81b filters, and how some things stay the same. There are some dramatic improvements. For instance, there was a dust speck in one of my lenses, and Photoshop cleaned that right up. Thank you context-aware fill! With slide film I would have been stuck with one ruined slide after another. The flip side of that is that with slide film I was putting a new "sensor" behind every exposure. Pengtoh looked at one of my photos and told me that my sensor needs cleaning (despite the self-cleaning nature of the sensor)! Obviously, I need to send my camera in for a cleaning before the next major trip. Nature photography is naturally hard on equipment. Wind and rain and switching lenses in less than totally clean conditions is something that every nature photographer has to do, and very few portrait/wedding photographers have to face on a regular basis.

One unexpected delight: with my ultra-fast PC post-processing, selection, and culling is extra-ordinarily fast. Lightroom 3 with 2 24-inch monitors really takes the cake. It felt like having an infinitely large light-table, and while I think the program could use a speedup, it's quite clear that the latest version is significantly faster. In the film days, the turnaround time for slides was at least 1 week! Then the culling would have taken another, just because the physical process of loading slides into a slide page and then laying it down on a slide table was tougher. Cropping, color correction, dust removal, and even post-editing with ND grad. filters is fast and produces amazing results. Not to mention to shoot as much film as I did, I would have had to carry 100 rolls, which was $1,000 in film. That's an extra-ordinary amount of money for a 2 week shoot, and I would have curtailed my shooting rather than carry 100 rolls. My old standard was 30 rolls for a 2 week trip. Making as many exposures as a National Geographic photographer makes in the field cannot help but improve your photography.

It was clear to me that the choice to stay with full frame cameras was the right thing for me. I liked using my wide angles like wide angles, and I think my desire for longer than 200mm lens can be satisfied with tele-converters in the future. I wish I had brought my laptop with me, because then I would have spotted dust on the lens, etc. The display on the 5D2 is good, but not so good that I can spot little dust specs. All in all, this trip has re-kindled my love of photography, and re-injected confidence that yes, I am capable of using the $2500 piece of gear I bought to the maximum extent. The Canon 5D Mk 2 is certainly the most expensive piece of equipment I've bought, but it easily justifies every penny of the price. And obviously if I shoot enough with it the savings in film alone would make it eventually the cheapest camera I've ever bought.

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2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors Trip

2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

When my family and I started exploring the Canadian Rockies in 1994, 1995, and 1996, I wasn't much of a photographer, so we spent a lot of our time hiking, backpacking, and enjoying the back-country. I became a somewhat decent photographer by the 2000, but for one reason or another, never did visit the Canadian Rockies since.

Since my retirement from Google in April, I've decided that I should take a trip dedicated to photography. A photography trip is very different from any other kind of trip: you effectively spend most of your time looking for sunrises and sunsets, and non-photographers get annoyed by the amount of time spent shooting. None of my other photographer friends could join me, however, so I had to do the trip alone. That made this my first solo trip in 10 years or so as well! Note that while Glacier National Park is in the U.S., from a geological point of view it's part of the Canadian Rockies.

In the past, I've had issues with putting together photo albums: there's a fundamental conflict between including only the good shots and good trip reporting. This time, I'm trying a different tack: the good shots are in the album above, and I'll create a different photo album for photojournalism entries. During the trip, I shot about 3399 exposures, and selected 71 photos to be included in the above "best of" album. That's an abysmal hit rate: for the Grand Tetons trip, I exposed about 900 frames and got about 80 usable slides out of it. Nevertheless, many of those 80 slides were photojournalism shots, and looking at the album I have up, I don't think the number of strong photos have gone down.

Over the next few days, a full trip report will follow, and then I really do have to get back to my next book.

Trip Report

• Day 1: Kalispell to Apgar Creek
  
• Day 2: Apgar Creek to St. Mary's
  
• Day 3: St. Mary's to Many Glacier
  
• Day 4: Many Glacier to Waterton Lakes National Park
  
• Day 5: Waterton Lakes National Park
  
• Day 6: Waterton Lakes National Park to Banff
  
• Day 7: Banff to Lake Louise
  
• Day 8: Lake Louise to Egypt Lake hut
  
• Day 9: Egypt Lake Hut
  
• Day 10: Egypt Lake Hut to Jasper
  
• Day 11: Jasper to Wilcox Pass Trailhead Campground
  
• Day 12: Wilcox Pass Trailhead Campground to Banff
  
• Day 13: Banff to Many Glacier
  
• Day 14: Many Glacier to Kalispell
  
• Epilogue and Conclusions
  

Review: Chasing Stars

I've always maintained that performance is extremely contextual: treating performance as an individual issue, not as a team effort is misleading, because we don't know how important the kind of support other people on the team goes into making a star valuable. Chasing Stars is the first book that examines performance in context, and therefore I consider it a very important book, and very much worth your time if you work in a highly intellectual profession.

The context in question is that of star stock analysts. Groysberg picks this field because stock analyst performance (as rated by customers) is widely publicized in an industry standard fashion. As a highly intellectual profession, such ranked analysts are easily compared with each other, and analysts consider themselves as having highly portable skills. It is also tempting for analyst departments in various corporations to raid each other for talented employees, since having a top analyst would presumably be valuable in attracting customers.

Groysberg analyzes a 15 year period of such poaching, and approaches the data in all the directions you would think of. He looks at ranking before and after a move. He looks at ranking if an entire team moves (known as a "liftout") versus an individual moving. He segments analysts by gender. He even takes into account investor sentiment (i.e., what happens to the acquiring company's stock price after the star analyst acquisition was announced). His thoroughness lends a lot of credibility to the conclusions he draws.

The first distinction he makes is the difference between corporations that spend a lot of time training and acculturating new hires and coaching existing employees and corporations that focus on generic job training. It turns out, for instance, that the corporations that do invest in training and the acculturation process do get something for their efforts: not only are they better at creating new star analysts, they also pay a reduced cost of retention: they pay about 5% less than market for the talent that they do hang on to. Furthermore, it is harder to hire star analysts from such departments, and even when they do move, they frequently discover that their skills are not as portable as they thought: performance (as measured by analyst rankings) deteriorates for a year or two after such a move. This is quite a result.

Secondly, Groysberg also distinguishes between corporations with a lot of resources to devote to the analysts in the form of IT support, staffing help, and other networking help and corporations that don't have such resources. It turns out that analyst performance improves (as expected) when moving to corporations with a richer set of resources, but not by as much as you would expect, because the overhead of building relationships to gain access to such resources takes time.

Entire team moves seem to be extremely favorable: performance hardly ever drops, and all the employees in the team already can work together. Groysberg does note that there's also a big difference between a team brought in to exploit an existing market that the corporation always works in, and to explore a new market opportunity. The latter induces much worse performance than the former, probably because of the interaction with the sales team to educate them as well as the learning curve involved in exploring a new market.

Finally, Groysberg covers women. As in engineering, women analysts were rare on Wall Street, and had a hard time breaking into the cozy old-boy's network. Because of this effect, women analysts learned to build relationships and access resources outside of the corporation they worked in, which allows them to have the most portable skill sets --- women who switched companies did the best amongst the switchers. It also turned out that women were more likely to consider whether the culture of the new company they were joining was conducive to high performance, rather than just jumping ship for higher pay.

The big question mark here is whether any of Groysberg's findings apply to software. I certainly think that the current big company trend of buying small startups in one fell swoop and integrating the engineering team is reflective of the understanding that keeping a winning team together is important. (Though just how important is still frequently under-recognized: some companies are bought only to have their team members split apart) The "nurture" versus "nature" debate as far as engineering culture is concerned appears to also have been lost amongst many firms: many companies devote relatively little time to training and acculturation, and pay the price with reduced performance of its engineers.

All in all, this is an excellent book, and very much worth your time and money. Highly recommended, and definitely one of the few books that will be short-listed for the book of the year.

Day 14: Many Glacier to Kalispell

I woke up in the morning to the sound of rain drops on the roof of my van and groaned. This did not bode well at all. And in fact, as I drove out to the hotel things were drab drab drab. Hoping for better light outside the park, I drove out and found everything gray as well. This was not a good day for photography.

I visited the St. Mary's Park HQ and got talking to Sarah, one of the park rangers who was very experienced with the back-country. She recommended that I come back in the summer for a backpacking trip, including one which would lead all the way across to Waterton Lakes from Glacier National Park's customs border, take the ferry across into Canada, and then a shuttle back to the U.S. border where we could walk back to pick up the car. That sounded fantastic. She pointed me at several other backpacks as well, and said that there was always something held in reserve for walk-ins, so advanced booking was not necessary if I didn't want to spend the $50 reservation fee.

The rangers were so nice to me (on a rainy day they did not get much visitor) they bucked the schedule and put on a movie just for me while I was there. It was a good visit for a rainy day. The drive back to Kalispell was un-eventful. I had gotten a response to my couch-surfing request (my very first couch surf), and discovered that not only were Alan and Sarah friendly and putting me up, their roommate Joan was also making dinner that night! I was pretty sick of my own cooking and so was happy to help gather produce from their garden for the meal.

I repacked my car so that the next day I could simply put all my bags in it and drive to the airport. Dinner with Sarah, Alan, and Joan was fun and the conversation was entertaining. We then took a walk after dinner and visited one of their neighbors: Gina and Greg Nelson. They were affiliated with Stanford and spent part of the evening quizzing me about Silicon Valley matters. I guess if I wanted a transition back to Silicon Valley this was definitely a smooth one!

We had to find our way back in the dark and I set my alarm clock for 4:15am so I could make my 6:00am flight. My photography vacation, the first one since my 2002 Grand Tetons and Yellowstone trip was over.

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Day 13: Banff to Many Glacier

I woke up in the morning and made breakfast in the kitchen. I heard two women talking about driving to Glacier National Park en route to Minnesota. I asked if they knew that Logan Pass was closed. "No!" "Well, yes it is. On the East side you can drive all the way to Logan Pass but you won't be allowed to go over. On the West side you get to Avalanche Creek and then it's game over." "Well, that settles it. We're going to go to the East side then." They were on a road trip from their summer jobs in Alaska, and highly recommended that I visit Alaska one of these days, preferably during the summer. I knew what I wanted to do next summer, but maybe the summer after that I'll visit Alaska.

It was drizzling as I pulled out of the parking lot for my morning shoot. I wanted to see if Two Jacks would be better and that maybe I would see a rainbow, but no luck at all this morning. With a sigh, I pulled out and started driving towards Kananaski Provincial Park. In the cloudy morning like Kananaski Provincial Park was gorgeous. With clouds blowing in and out of the road I felt like in the dream world.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

The kicker, though was the amount of wildlife seen on the road! Because the road was so isolated and deserted, wildlife was frequently seen on the road. In fact, the first time I saw a pair of Moose on the road side I thought they must have been plastic reproductions, since they were so big and did not move even though I was approaching. When I saw they were real I stopped and put on the 200mm lens. The lesson I've been learning on the entire trip is that when I'm driving I just need to run the longest lens I've got in case I spot wildlife.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

He was quite an animal, and I was very impressed. Less than a mile later I ran across a group of goats who were happy to have me shoot them while they went all over the road. These animals were not at all afraid of humans and cars, and I could even drive up next to them if I wanted to. It was an amazing sight.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

Driving out of the park, the GPS unit navigated me onto a dirt road. I thought about turning back but I've never denied myself the chance to ride an obscure dirt road on a bicycle, so why stop just because I had a mini-van? One of my favorite song quotes was from the Cowboy Junkie's Anniversary Song:

Have you ever satisfied a gut feeling
to follow a dry dirt road that's beckoning you
to the heart of a shimmering summer's day?

So I indulged myself and followed the road. At first it drove through foreboding country: obviously the land here had been logged and/or burned, with big patches of empty hill side and long stretches of blackened tree stumps. But in a little bit I was rewarded by the sight of a cowboy, his partner, and two dogs at work herding some cattle into a field. I shot pictures from the car and tried not to disturb their work or the cattle.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

It was with no little relief, however, when I drove back onto pavement near Waterton Lakes National Park, and saw the fall colors still present in neat little clumbs near farmland.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

I had intended to detour into Waterton Lakes for a quick look on the way to the US border, but a signboard informed me that the Chief Mountain customs office was closed for the season. I reprogrammed the GPS to point me towards Cardston, which was the other customs location nearby. On the way there I saw a farm that looked pretty to my eyes and pulled in for a quickie shoot.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

I stopped by Cardston's tourist information center to ask about the weather and use the rest room. The lady there was familiar with the Cobblestone Manor and told me it had changed management recently. That made me feel a bit better about missing them twice. They were still closed today because it was a Monday. Maybe some day when I return for a summer backpacking trip I can still visit.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

The drive across the border happened in the rain, but that meant there was so little traffic that the U.S. customs official felt obliged to justify his pay by looking into my van to make sure I didn't have any undeclared merchandise. I drove into Babb and gassed up my car (cheap American gasoline!), and then drove into Many Glacier to find a picnic table to make an early dinner so I could shoot the sunset. I met another camper and we agreed to share a campground. That turned out to be only $5 each, which was a good deal since I did not want to use that gravel parking lot in St. Mary's after the bad memories.

Driving out of Many Glacier, I spotted in my rear view mirror a gorgeous sight --- Lake Sherburn had clouds that looked beautiful, and lent the place a ghostly light.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

I shot several shots and worked the angles a bit and then moved on, hoping against hope that I was not too late. It turned out that over the past two weeks the sunset time had shifted until I was pretty much too late. The cloud cover had also caused the sunset to be early, and as I drove back and forth the Chief Mountain International Highway I cursed myself for not being attentive enough to the weather conditions and missing what was a great shoot. I salvaged the situation in time by returning to an old familiar spot and getting two final glorious shots of the Montana Sky in action.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

I did not know it then, but it was to be my last good shoot of the trip.

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Day 12: Wilcox Pass Trailhead campground to Banff

I woke up bright and early and ready to hit the trail. Well, actually, I dithered a bit because I was in no hurry to get up to the ridge and then spend my time walking back and forth trying to stay warm. Nevertheless, it was 6:10 when I hit the trail, which was plenty of time to get to where I wanted to go.

Right on schedule, I hit what I considered to be a good spot at 6:50am. What's interesting was that I had made no notice of where I wanted to be the day before. I was simply making a consistent decision vis-a-vis photography from day to day, which was a good thing. I had forgotten my android phone, so I could not make ultra-long exposures consistently, but I immediately set up my tripod and got something that looked pretty good to me.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

Note that it was dark enough and 30s was long enough that the stars were beginning to produce star-trails in the photograph. I shot several exposures, and started bringing out the 200mm to capture what looked like a beautiful sunrise from behind the mountains. Yes, the very mountains that were frustrating my photography.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

Moments later, the sun finally started hitting the clouds and the snowscapes, and I started getting interesting alpenglow colors.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

The light was changing rapidly and I worked at a furious pace, knowing that I had at most 20 minutes to capture this amazing light. I was right. By 8:20am the lightshow as over and the only thing I had left to do was to shoot a picture of myself in front of the mountains in the morning light.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

I got back to the car where I met another hiker who told me that she'd been staying near the Cline River, off the Sasketchewan crossing. I made a note to look it up, knowing that I would be unlikely to find time to do it on this trip. I had 2 days left, and it was time to start driving South.

I headed South once again along the Icefield Parkway. Petra had mentioned that the Path of the Six Glaciers was worth checking out, and had said that it was only a 4 hour walk. I could definitely manage a 4 hour walk on top of Wilcox pass. Then after that I could head down to Banff in search of more sunset beauty. The drive was uneventful. I stopped at the Sasketchewan crossing for breakfast and to charge some batteries, and then later on I stopped several times for pictures but in the later morning light it really was futile. I ended up with pictures with muddy washed out colors that wouldn't be interesting at all to anyone else.

I arrived at the Banff Visitor Information center, confirmed everything Petra had said, and proceeded to drive up to Lake Louise to start the hike. What a contrast Lake Louise was to earlier visits in the morning. The place was packed with tourists and visitors walking along the lake shore. Boats were on the water, and it looked like everyone was out. It was an overcast day, and I set a furious pace along the flat section so I could get away from the mass of tourists.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

At the end of the lake, the stream feeding the lake became a delta, and the path started climbing up towards the Swiss-style tea house at the end of the trail. I learned from signboards posted on the walk that Swiss mountain guides had built the trail and the teahouse in the 1920s, which explained why everything was so well engineered and pretty. As the trail steepened I spied another hiker in front of me. She was going about the same pace I was, except that once in a while she would stop. At one of her stops she turned around and spied me, and waited for me to catch up before we started walking together. That was how I met Janice Belliveau.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

Janice and I were kindred spirits, for we immediately hit it off and had great conversation that went the length of the hike. She was from Nova Scotia, from Belliveau Cove, one of the great wooden ship building centers of the 19th and 20th century. Her father was restoring a great wooden ship for fun, even though he was not a sailor. She was here for a conference that would start tomorrow, and decided to do the hike alone because she had started hiking only a year ago. She was clearly a highly self-motivated person because she was clearly pushing the pace even though I was content to go at whatever speed she chose.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

At the tea house, we stopped for some tea and chocolate cake. Intrigued by the menu item which listed ice wine tea, I ordered some and it turned out to be exquisite. I resolved to order some as soon as I got home. Our table was next to another couple from San Francisco. Janice and I were both the kind of person who made friends easily, and soon enough all 4 of us were talking. It turned out that 3 out of the 4 of us were the same age. We enjoyed chatting with each other and exchanged information. I was delighted to see the kind of thing that Richard Wiseman talked about in The Luck Factor used and applied directly by Janice. She would attend conferences with the goal of meeting specific people and engaging them. This was someone who took charge of her destiny and was able to seize opportunities as they came up.

Speaking of opportunities, we saw that there was a way to turn the walk into a loop instead of an out and back hike, so we took it. The return loop took us high up above the lake, where we got to see the hotel at the edge of the lake as well as the turquoise that was characteristic of a glacier fed lake. All the way down from the mountain, Janice would tell people how far they were from the summit or the tea house, all without skipping a beat in our conversation, which revolved around her business, her kids, photography, hiking, and how we chose to spend our time. At the pace she set, we were done with the hike in 4 hours, and said goodbye to each other at Lake Louise.

I drove down to the visitor center to use the washroom, and there met two cyclists who were planning to ride to Argentina (they had already finished with the Ice Field Parkway that day, and I saw them riding earlier in the day while driving down the parkway).

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

Justin and Nathan had not started riding together, but they were riding together for this segment. They spoke of carrying enough food to last for days, lots of great weather and good cycling. The trip was clearly to their taste and they were enjoying themselves, even though once on the coast they would likely face headwinds if the La Nina year brought early storms to the Pacific North West. We exchanged stories about touring and then I headed South for Banff.

At Banff, I stopped by the Safeway to restock for the last 2 days worth of food, more chocolate, and then went to the youth hostel to use my newly acquired hosteling international membership. At $29.70 a night it was a pretty good deal for me to get my batteries charged, a warm shower, and some indoor cooking. The weather was extremely cloudy, which led me to be pessimistic about the chances of a good photo. I moved into my room quickly and then made dinner, chatting with other random strangers in the kitchen, including a biologist who quit his job to work as a hostel manager part of the year. He managed 3 wilderness hostels, and enjoyed having the free time to relax between the rest of the year.

After dinner, I drove to Mt. Norquay in the hopes of getting a sunset, but the gray clouds were persistent. Hoping to make the best of a bad situation, I decided to aim for dusk shot of Banff.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

After the shot I returned to the hostel to find that my bed had been moved. I needed a lower bunk because otherwise the power cord would not reach my CPAP machine. I moved back to the bunk and moved my stuff in. My other roommate, a woman from Sydney, told me that she'd never seen anything so rude! Well, I needed a shower so I ran off and took a shower. Unlike the shower in Jasper, the shower here was slow and only a little bit warm. I took a shower, brushed my teeth, and then headed back to my room to find my other roommates there. It turned out that it was two women traveling with Moose Travel Network, a popular travel agency made famous by Lonely Planet. Since I didn't read Lonely Planet, I didn't know about them. Stella and Naoko (they were not traveling together, but had some itinerary in common) apologized for not understanding the etiquette of moving people around in shared accommodations, and with that the dark cloud over my hostel stay was over.

Stella was from Canton, and Naoko was from Japan but was studying in Canada. It was amusing because I speak Japanese quite a lot better than I speak Cantonese, so Naoko and I could converse a little bit while Stella and I would speak in our respective Chinese dialects. "How many other languages do you speak," asked Stella. "German and French too?" said Naoko. I said, "Just enough to get by." "I was only joking!" "Awesome!" Stella was quite a traveler, and told me a few stories of her travels in China (still a country I have yet to visit). The stories told of someone with plenty of self-confidence and resourcefulness. I usually disliked these bus tours as being dragged around by the nose, but it was clear that Stella found a way to make them work for her, as well as working around the limitations in ways I did not imagine. I showed Naoko photos from last year's Tour of Hokkaido. She loved the look of Yubari Youth Hostel and said she would try to visit there.

The forecast did not bode well for the next day, but as always, I had to try. The tourist information office told me to drive through Kananaski Provincial Park on the way back to Glacier National Park (I was hoping for one more full sunset and sunrise there), but if you don't get up at 6:00am, you don't get to see rainbows and other nice things. So I committed to getting up again at that hour.

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Day 11: Jasper to Wilcox Pass Trailhead Campground

The morning found me downing a quick breakfast of ramen, tea, and sneaking out of the youth hostel by 6:30am. I started worrying about getting to the Mt. Christy lookout by first light, but I needn't have worried. The mountains kept Mt. Christy and others in shadow, which meant that I had plenty of time with which to shoot the sky prior to the anticipated alpenglow.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

When the actual alpenglow arrived, it was quick. I estimate the time of the start of the colors and the time of the finish was no more than 15 minutes. This was to be anticipated: it took till 8:00am before the light started to show, which meant that our golden hour was cut short by at least 20 minutes. I worked furiously at the Mount Christy lookout, and then drove quickly to the next site North to work it as well.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

Afterwards, I found out that other photographers were congregated at another site just a little further north, at a designated lookout point. If I had more time I would have tried that as well. I then headed towards Mt. Edith Cavell, which turned out to be on the road leading to the Athabasca Falls. I vaguely remember this set of Falls from 15 years ago, and paused for several pictures and some video.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

I then stopped by a road-side picnic area to make a bigger breakfast (brunch, if you choose to call it that), eating some bread, eggs, and then my eyes fell upon some expired freeze-dried food I had packed just to see whether expired freeze-dried food was edible. The food had been acquired from ages ago when Lisa was still eating seafood, and I didn't find it particularly palatable then, and it was even worse now. I quickly threw away the rest of the expired food after an initial tasting. I supposed that if I was stuck away from other food sources for 3 days I would find it palatable, but I figured that I would save my future self from such misery by tossing it away now while I still had my head screwed on straight.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

Mt. Edith Cavell's glacier walk started in a Canyon that's pretty much obscured from the sun during most of the day. Definitely some place to visit for a sunrise shoot one of these days, since even by mid-morning when I had started, the place was already nearly covered by shadows from the surrounding mountains. I walked up the trail rapidly, catching up to a group of Michigan hikers whom I enjoyed a conversation with, so chose to walk with them for a while. They mentioned that they were in the rockies for a week, hiking twice a day, but Michigan did not have any hills, so they struggled a bit on the climbs. This gave me plenty of time to do photography though!

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

Kenneth was a cyclist, so I pointed him at my cycle touring web-site, and told him about the 2007 tour, since he was headed to that area of Switzerland next year. Since Ken was a CPA as well as a cyclist, we enjoyed a conversation about the kind of people who needed financial advice, the kind of people who ignored advice, and what the consequences turned out to be. Some of his stories were truly mortifying, but having similar stories of my own, I was not too surprised. The hardest part about investing is emotional control, and it's one factor that has no relation whatsoever to how smart you are. It's not a surprise at all that even the smartest people I've met have trouble overcoming their own greed and short-sightedness.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

We got to the part of the trail where the easy walk ended and the strenuous uphill climb and scramble would start. We said goodbye to each other and I began the climb in earnest. The trail was barely defined and steep. More than once I wish I had had the foresight to bring my hiking poles. To my surprise about 45 minutes into this section I ran into two familiar faces. I recognized them from the hostel last night: they were two German speaking girls. Apparently the hostel manager had given them the same advice he'd given me (probably sans the sunrise location). "It's much longer than it looks," one warned me. (Never mistake a clear view for a short distance is one of my favorite quotes from Beyond Entrepreneurship, a book Reed Hastings talked me into reading years and years ago) The other said, "It gets quite slippery at the top with a lot of loose rock." Well, I had water, I had food, and I was used to pain, so I pressed on after asking the two girls for a photo of myself.

They were not kidding about the steepness and the climb, and in fact, at the start of the scramble I was forced to drop my backpack full of photo gear and my tripod in favor of going light with one lens, the SLR, and of course, my backup camera. I figured my photo gear was safe because if anyone actually tried to steal it while I was scrambling, by the time I came down I'd have a very easy time catching him on the downhill and without a load. The top of the scramble was spectacular, not only lending a great view of Mt. Edith Cavell, but on the other side, an amazing view of the ice field parkway. The wind was very strong and there was no one else around, causing me to have to pile rocks together to make a tripod with which to get pictures.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

You should ignore the GPS coordinates for most of those pictures, since the GPS unit was abandoned along with the rest of the camera bag. The descent was a little sketchy, causing me to fall at one point, but fortunately it was a "sit down suddenly" type of fall, so there were no bruises except to my self-confidence. My camera bag was still waiting for me when I arrived, so I strapped it on and started hiking down, which was a much faster descent than the climb up. I started meeting lots of people, and then realized that I was encountering day visits, including the outdoors club from Prince George University. I had a brief conversation with them and then headed on my way to finish the rest of the easy walk.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Journalism

Mt. Edith Cavell's glacier was pretty, with lots of waterfalls flowing off it overhanging a cave. The park ranger told me not to go there, even though there were lots of tourists standing under the glacier getting photos. "The glacier can calve multiple times a day, sometimes with no warning. If you're standing right under it when it does..." She did not have to finish the sentence.

It was mid-afternoon by the time I got off the trail, but I wanted to check out the Columbia Icefield the next day. I was told to stop by the Beauty Creek Youth Hostel to speak to the manager there, whose name was Tim. I arrived around 4:00pm, and he took the time to tell me about possible places to go, one of which I was probably going to use, Wilcox Pass. He mentioned a bush-whack that could get me a better view, but I was dubious about making the trek in the dark. "You do have time to scout it out now, you know." That was a good point. So I hurriedly ate dinner using the hostel's stove, and then drove out, passing what looked like a good Falls for sunset on the way to the start of Wilcox Pass.

I was pretty tired from one already strenuous hike that day, but that meant that my pace would be similar to what I could manage in the dark. I started the hike in shadow but after about 40 minutes made it to the ridge of the pass. From the ridge I could tell that it would be a long walk to get to the mountain in front of the ice field, but furthermore, from a photographic point of view, it would not be necessary. The big glaciers were right in front of the Wilcox Pass trail, and with a telephoto I could reach all the areas that would be hit by Alpenglow. Even the ridge line in front of me could be useful, and not necessarily be a hindrance.

With that bit of responsibility done, I hiked back down to see what I could make of the fading light. As I drove past the ice-field, the remaining bit of evening light caught my eye and I drove to the ice field's parking lot and made several exposures with the mountains and snow against the changing light.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

The limited extent of the light meant that I had to use the 200mm lens, which is a continual source of wonder to me. Fully open it is beautiful and sharp, but stopped down and aimed at a mountain top it has a magical quality that impressed me.

I kept driving into the twilight to verify that Wilcox pass was the best place to be. In photography, the amount of effort put into the photo has nothing to do with the results, and sometimes the road is a better place to shoot. I thought I had found a better place until I checked the compass and realized that it would be entirely back-lit by sunrise. So Wilcox pass it was. I decided against staying at Beauty Creek hostel: it had no power or showers, so I might as well camp out at the Wilcox Pass trailhead, which conveniently had a shower. On my way back there, however, I saw a pair of mountain goats, and snapped several shots with my 200mm wide open. The camera was set at ISO 3200, which meant that I would be lucky to get anything at all, but to my surprise my Canon once again came through with a shot that I would never have expected from my days of shooting chemical film.

From 2010 Canadian Rockies Fall Colors

I arrived at the campground around 8:00pm, brushed my teeth, set up my sleeping bag for sleeping in the van, and set my alarm clock at 6:00am again. Not having to drive far the next morning allowed me to sleep in.

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