Water – the life of a nature photographer

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?

Paddling and Plastics

Canoeing, sustainability, Water

Saturday, April 13th, 2019

Canoeing down Stony Creek in early spring.

Spring is here, and with it (for me anyway, for you if you want?) come adventures on the water. Last weekend I went with friends down Stony Creek from the town of Camrose to the Battle River. It is only runnable in early spring when the water is high. Along the way we came across a lot of litter – most of it plastic – and picked up as much as we could while the current was sweeping us along.

Nils and I with a our collection of trash.
Photo by Greg King.

Plastic in nature is more than an eyesore, and we’re starting to understand this more all the time. When it is exposed to sunlight and abrasion, it breaks down. Breaking down sounds like a good thing, but it just creates really small pieces of plastic that get everywhere – and by everywhere I mean into the air, water, animals and humans. Micro-plastics have been found in almost all people, including babies. They’re in urine, breast milk, and can affect all sorts of systems in the body. Although we’re just starting to figure out the various effects, it is pretty clear that it’s not a good thing. If you want to know more, there is a ton of information from academic papers to accessible youtube videos.

So when you’re out enjoying nature, pick up any plastic you see! Use less plastic when you have the option, and recycle what you can. Although we can’t remove micro-plastics from the environment, we can remove larger plastic pieces which helps. And it makes paddling down these creeks a little more enjoyable too!

Katelynn approaching a flooded beaver dam. We ran a few of these and they were so much fun!

Kingaunmiut Falls

Canoeing, Landscape, Photo of the Day, Tundra, Water

Thursday, April 4th, 2019

After Skull Rapids, we had a couple uneventful days of paddling and portaging. Then we got to a slightly longer portage, which would be just a small warm-up for our real portage (more on that later). But at the end of this long sweaty ordeal, we got a beautiful, flat campsite at the bottom of Kingaunmiut Falls, with a Peregrine Falcon (Falco peregrinus) scolding us for a bit before it accepted our presence as inevitable. Or maybe it realized we couldn’t scale the cliffs to get to its nest. This is also where we saw a distant herd of muskox for the first time.

Notes:
1. All of these photos were taken near midnight.
2. I was saying it “King – gun – mute”. If any speakers of an Inuit language are reading, I’d love to be corrected!

Skull Rapid

Camping, Canoeing, Landscape, Tundra, Water

Friday, March 1st, 2019

Having lunch above Skull Rapids on the Hood River

Skull Rapid – it’s an ominous name for a long and violent rapid, crashing over and through large boulders. This was our first portage of many, right at the outlet of Esker Lake. We figured out how to organize our gear, how to tie loose gear on to packframes, and how much we could all carry. It was a short portage at only a few hundred meters, and we completed it fairly quickly and had lunch on the bluff overlooking the rapid. The rapid is named for an old muskox skull, slowly decaying in the mats of flowering labrador tea (Ledum sp.).

Paddling Through Ice

Canoeing, Tundra, Water

Sunday, January 27th, 2019

Candled ice on the corner of Esker Lake.

Not all the ice on the Hood River was solid. As we got to Esker Lake, the last major lake on the river, we started getting a lot of candled ice. Candled ice is an experience. As the ice melts, it forms long vertical splinters (often 8-25cm long and less than an a few cm thick) that eventually break apart. When you are sitting still, it sounds like the most beautiful windchimes you can imagine spread out over the surface of a lake. There is a delicate glasslike tinkling like a million tiny toasts to you being there. But when you try to canoe through it, it creates a harsh racket and tries to block everything you do. Much of the time we had to chop it up with our paddles so our canoes could actually move. Normal canoes (we had two royalex prospectors and a canyon) slide through with a bit of effort, but pakboats stick to every little piece. We eventually learned to paddle in pairs of boats with a hard-sided canoe breaking the trail and a pakboat following right behind through the broken ice before it could close back in. Even so it is much slower than walking and you’re fighting for every paddle stroke. Luckily we only had a few hours of paddling through candled ice on this trip.

Taking a break after some hard paddling.

Surveying the expanse of candled ice we have to paddle through.

From the shore of Esker Lake.

Canoeing on Ice

Camping, Canoeing, Photo of the Day, Tundra, Water

Friday, January 11th, 2019

Ice on Cave Lake beside our first campsite.

To canoe in the arctic you either have to wait until late in the summer or encounter ice at some point. There was still plenty of ice on the lakes when we started on the Hood River in late June.

On Cave Lake, we started by trying to skirt the shore where the ice was mostly melted. We quickly ran into solid ice right up to the shore. The ice was still thick enough to support us in most spots. With the normal canoes, you could take a run at the ice and if you had enough speed, the front of the canoe would pop out of the water and you’d launch yourself onto the ice. Then the bow paddler could quickly jump out and pull the canoe all the way up.

With pakboats it was a little more tricky. You would have to sidle up to the ice and try to step out onto a relatively slippery surface without pushing your boat away from the ice. And since the bottoms of the pakboats are a sticky rubber material, we had “crazy carpets” that we would tie to the bottom of the boats so they would slide easily on the ice, similar to the regular canoes.

Then we would pull the loaded canoes across the ice, sometimes for quite a few kilometers at a time. Occasionally there would be breaks in the ice where we would have to get in the canoes, paddle for a meter or two, and get back out and pull further.

The trick for not falling through the ice is to stick to the whiter areas. The darker spots are where the ice is starting to melt and get soft. Usually it was still pretty thick there, but the lighter colored ice was definitely more solid.

No one fell through the entire trip!

Pulling canoes over Esker Lake a few days later.

Ice piled up on the shore of Cave Lake. You can see a little band of water we had to canoe over in the distance.

The trickiest parts were where water and ice mixed.

Classes & Kaleido

Business, Classes, Water

Thursday, September 14th, 2017

This weekend is Kaleido Festival on 118 Ave, and I’ll be there with lots of new prints! I also have greeting cards for the first time in a few years – I know people have been asking for them for a while.

On Sunday I’m teaching a Mastering Your SLR class in Edmonton – there is still space! Head over to Threaded Studio to sign up online or visit me at Kaleido on Friday or Saturday to get a discount!

Taken in southern California.

Trip Guiding

Camping, Canoeing, Landscape, Marshes, Water

Wednesday, July 5th, 2017

For the first part of this summer, I put my outdoor experience to work guiding groups of students in our beautiful Rocky Mountains. I loved the opportunity to share the challenges and beauty of the outdoors with these students. The people I was working with are amazing and made the whole experience a lot of fun! But guiding is busy and constant work and helping others enjoy nature is not conducive to finding peaceful moments myself. As guides we are always the last to bed and the first to wake up, and these are the times when we’re most likely to be able to take a little bit of time to just enjoy being.

This is one moment, early in the morning beside the North Saskatchewan River between Nordegg and Rocky Mountain House. It may look like a peaceful moment, but really I was sprinting around with my camera because the light was so amazing and I had to start making breakfast and pack up before the students woke up.

25mm, f6.3, 1/400 of a second

Adventures on the Brazeau

Camping, Canoeing, Photo of the Day, Water

Wednesday, November 9th, 2016

The middle part of August was spent on the Brazeau River. The trip started with a drive to the put-in and a portage to get the boats and gear down to the river. It was supposed to be a roughly 2km portage, but it turned out the river had moved and there was no good place to put in where we had planned. This required a short planning session, a bit of exploration, and eventually a longer portage.

To get the boats down the steep bank to our new campsite and put-in, we built a pulley system to lower the canoes with gear in them. The portage and lowering took until after 9pm, at which point we were all hungry and tired.

But we were finally at the river. We had canoes and gear and could start our trip. Despite being tired, I couldn’t resist staying up a little later to see the stars come out, watch the moon rise, and listen to the river rushing by. Tomorrow we would be canoeing this beauty, and that was exciting!

The next day dawned clear and bright. After a breakfast of toast and beans warmed over a fire, we packed up our tents and sleeping bags, loaded the canoes, and started paddling.

At almost every corner there were significant rapids and we would stop to scout them. Often they were not a big deal, but every once in a while there would be some high-consequence rocks to avoid.

Sometimes they were just fun!

We were canoeing into two groups. I was near the back of the second group. Then there was a fairly long section of big waves followed by a tricky corner with no place to stop and scout from. A lot of the canoes had been taking on a bit of water in the long section of whitewater. I didn’t see what happened to the first group at the corner, but I saw the leader in my group flip over. The next canoe got pushed into a rock and dumped. Then the canoe right in front of me dumped. At that point I knew there was a good chance of me and Bjarke going over, so we just focused on picking a good line, not pushing through the big waves (to get less water in the boat) but having enough power to get through the current to the other side before getting pushed into the rock, and just getting through so we could help people out on the other side. We made it, but had quite a bit of water in our canoe. We eddied out on the other side of the turn, but it wasn’t much of an eddy and was trying to push us further downstream. We saw a beach on the other side and ferried across in our now-tippy canoe to assess the situation. There was one other canoe and five other people there. Across the river we could see one canoe and four people.

There were 21 in our group. Eventually, we heard that the leader of the first group had been able to keep 5 canoes from getting too far downstream and people were scattered along both shores, separated by water and cliffs. Eventually we accounted for everyone and all the canoes. Amazingly, the only damage was one broken yoke and a lot of cold, wet people. Duct tape “fixed” the first problem and lots of fires, shared warm clothes from accessible canoes, and movement fixed the second one. After a few hours (including a thunderstorm that stalled our efforts for a bit) we managed to collect everybody and everything in one spot and set off to find a place we could stop and camp. The corner is now affectionately named “Carnage Corner” by our group.

Exhausted and hungry, we pulled into our new campsite on a sandy island. Unloading, setting up camp, changeing out of wet clothes, and making supper took a long time, but we all had lots of stories to tell and listen to and the time flew by.

We had a good few days on the island, learning all kinds of plant identification, wilderness skills, and enjoying being completely immersed in nature.

We had time to reflect on the different roles in emergency response, what our response was and what we wished it had been. It was decided that we would end the canoe trip early as there was a section further down the river where the consequences for a similar debacle would be much more severe. There was a canyon where, if someone dumped, they would be swimming for kilometers instead of meters. With water that cold, hypothermia would not only be possible but likely in such a situation. So we had time for chatting, campfires, and some much needed rest.

After a few days I was happy to get back on the water. As we went downstream there were still rapids but they seemed to get less constant and more easily avoidable. The cliffs on each side lowered a bit. Maybe it was just that I was well rested, but the canoeing seemed a lot easier and maybe a little less exciting.

We got to our new take-out spot early in the afternoon and started the process of unloading canoes and loading up trailers. And we started thinking about the next section of our trip – backpacking.

Whitewater Instruction

Camping, Canoeing, Photo of the Day, Water

Sunday, November 6th, 2016

During the first bit of August I was learning to be a better canoeist, canoe instructor, and whitewater rescuer. These were full, intense days mostly on the Kananaskis River. I’ve taken a Paddle Canada Moving Water course before, but it was a long time ago and even then my skills needed a lot of work. The skill development involved much ferrying (getting across the river without being pushed downstream) and many eddy turns and s-turns. Paddle Canada has changed some of their teaching methods recently so we learned the older PATS (Power, Angle, Tilt, Stroke) and got a taste of the newer MITH (Momentum, Initiate, Tilt, Hold) methods for eddy turns. I actually enjoyed seeing the difference between the two. I learned more by trying both than if I had just learned one. I’m sad they’re losing the angle of the canoe in the transition to MITH because I found that a very important factor to consider depending on the speed and angle of the current and where I wanted to end up. But the end result in either case is that you have to feel the canoe and water working together smoothly to get where you want to go. We worked on our form come rain or shine, on warm days and cold days.

We also did a quick trip down the river from Canoe Meadows to Seebe to work on our river reading skills and have a bit of fun. There was one hole where a few people dumped, but it was an easy self rescue as the river was pretty calm for a while downstream.

In the evenings we dried all the wet gear we could, made supper, washed dishes, filtered water, sometimes fixed and modified canoes, and then went to sleep in our tents in Canoe Meadows.

Some days we switched it up and did some whitewater rescue work. This involved a lot of throw bag practice, rope system figuring, and learning to swim in rapids. One evening, to practice our z-drags, we set up a 9-1 rope system to pull a Suburban across the field. This was good practice for our test of pulling a kayak loaded with rocks up a 30 foot cliff the next day. This was to simulate the amount of force needed to pull a canoe off a rock. Once in my life I’ve had the misfortune of being in a group where a canoe got wrapped. I didn’t know about z-drags then and I didn’t have the equipment with me anyway. After trying to move the canoe for half an hour, we ended up getting a tree to use as a lever and with three of us pulling on the tree we eventually pried it off the rock. Water flowing at a good speed is not something to be taken lightly.

Swimming was the most fun though (at least for the people whose drysuits were not leaking). The combination of defensive swimming, aggressive swimming, and rolling across eddy lines was a lot of work, a lot of fun, and really effective education. It did involve a fair number of bruised knees, ripped nails, and jammed fingers, but we all survived and had a blast.

Although it was rare, we occasionally got a chance to chill. These times were filled with music, walks along the river, and campfires.

It was hard for me to fit photography into this intense schedule. It was great practice for me to take pictures of people in action without being too distracted from the learning I had to do along with everyone else. But my normal practice of meditative photography was pretty much impossible. Since August I’ve had the opportunity to lead a canoe trip and do a bit of teaching. Although there was still a lot to do and a lot of interaction, I found a lot more time for photography while leading. Hopefully I’ll eventually get to that story here too.