Our first month on the road

Spirit Island on Maligne Lake - Alberta Canada

It’s been a little over a month since iMa and I wrapped up the galleries, packed up our lives, and headed out on the road.

After all the build up to this, it feels a little strange to say that we’re actually doing it.

We started in the Canadian Rockies, traveling through Jasper, down the Icefields Parkway, and eventually into Banff. The weather gave us plenty to work around. We had rain, low clouds, and days when the light simply wasn’t there. But there were also some wonderful openings.

We took the boat across Maligne Lake to Spirit Island, hiked into the mountains at Wilcox Pass where I had an incredible opportunity to photograph a group of bighorn sheep, and spent five days exploring Banff. Moraine Lake, Lake Louise, Yoho, Abraham Lake and a lot of places in between kept me very busy.

Bighorn Sheep at Wilcox Pass - Jasper National Park

From Canada we headed south to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.

Yellowstone affected me more than I expected.

Part of that was simply being there. The geysers, hot springs, waterfalls, wildlife and sheer scale of the place are extraordinary. But I also kept thinking about how close we came to never having places like this protected at all.

When Yellowstone was being explored in the 1800s, much of the American West was being looked at in terms of what could be mined, logged or settled. Early reports of Yellowstone sounded so unbelievable that some people simply didn’t believe them.

Then an expedition went into Yellowstone with artists, including photographer William Henry Jackson and painter Thomas Moran. Their images helped people thousands of miles away in Washington D.C. understand that this place was truly exceptional, and that it was worth preserving. Thus began the National Park system. 

Sunset Over Grand Prismatic Hot Spring - Yellowstone National Park

Standing there with my own camera more than 150 years later, I thought about that quite a bit.

Photography has changed enormously since Jackson carried his cumbersome equipment through Yellowstone, but one part of the work hasn’t changed much at all.

A photograph can bring someone into a place they may never have seen for themselves. It can make a distant landscape real.

And sometimes it can simply remind us how lucky we are to be alive in a world where places like this exist.

Dawn Along the Snake River  - Grand Teton National Park

I came home from this first month with thousands of photographs. Most of them will never become finished pieces. That has always been part of my process. I photograph freely while I’m out there, then live with the images for a while and slowly figure out which ones actually carry the true essence of what it felt like being there.

These three are an early glimpse.

There’s a great deal more for me to go through over the coming months, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of what remains. If any of these photographs particularly speaks to you, you're always welcome to reply and ask me about it.

I’m grateful to be back out in these wild places, and grateful to have you along for the journey!