the life of a nature photographer – Page 4 – photographic discovery through exploration

Adventure Sizing

Landscape, Marshes, Photo of the Day, Prairie, Travel

Wednesday, June 12th, 2019

Time in nature is important for everyone. It doesn’t require a long trip. It doesn’t require a canoe. It doesn’t require fancy camping gear. It doesn’t even require much knowledge, although all these things help.

When I’ve had time to post lately I’ve been posting photos from multi-week expeditions in remote locations that not a lot of people get to experience. These adventures have been really exciting for me and have helped me develop my outdoor skills. This spring, I’ve been leading week-long canoe trips for high school students, enabling them to see places and have experiences that they wouldn’t get to normally. And I’m convinced these are all good things.

But for most of us, taking a week off work is tough. And figuring out how to acquire camping gear, a canoe, and the knowledge to safely paddle a river is often unrealistic. To experience the outdoors, you don’t need these things. My hope for the high school students I’m leading on trips is that they will gain an appreciation for spending time outside, not just on trips.

I live in Edmonton, and though I rarely post pictures from here, I run through the forest in the river valley close to my home every week. This is an essential dose of nature for me that anyone can experience. Our trails in the river valley in Edmonton are great and everyone here has access to them!

If you have a car, Elk Island National Park is an easy place to get to for an evening walk or picnic (or try Cooking Lake Recreation Area if you don’t want to pay the National Park fees). All these photos are from a two hour walk in Elk Island. This time and nature is no less valuable than weeks in the wilderness. It does the same thing for me – it renews my sense of wonder and joy.

I hope everyone reading this takes the time to enjoy nature in the next week, even if it’s just a short walk in your local park. This still counts as an adventure!

Grizzlies on the Hood

Camping, Canoeing, Tundra, Wildlife

Thursday, May 2nd, 2019

Grizzlies grazing on the banks of the Hood River.

Below the Wright River confluence the character of the Hood River changed. It started feeling like a legitimate river with a significant current. It started to get a bit splashy, so we put the spraydecks on the canoes. This let us keep paddling instead of constantly bailing water out of the boats. It turned out that our packboats were all leaking a bit, so we occasionally had to stop and bail anyway. At one point we spotted a couple grizzlies grazing on the bank. We watched them for about 15 minutes before they spotted us. The younger, lighter colored bear took off along the shore, swam across the ice-cold river, and disappeared over the north bank. The mother (we think) followed shortly after, keeping a close eye on us.

We started paddling with spraydecks, as there were frequent small rapids.

Wright River

Canoeing, Tundra

Saturday, April 27th, 2019

Looking east towards the Hood River with the Wright River coming in from the south.

The short day from Kingaunmiut Falls to the Wright River confluence was possibly the smoothest day on this trip. The river was easy and glassy calm. We stopped to watch a few muskox grazing on the tundra far up the bank. We got to the Wright River early and had lots of time for a walk. We found old Inuit tent rings, fascinating rock formations and frost heaving, beautiful falls on the Wright River, and a school of Arctic Grayling swimming in the pool at the bottom of the falls with their tall dorsal fins constantly cutting through the still surface.

Falls on the Wright River as it tumbles towards the Hood.

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!

Research by Canoe: RangeChange.ca

Business, Canoeing, Tundra

Friday, March 22nd, 2019

A large part of my last summer was spent researching shrub growth just above treeline in the Northwest Territories. I’ve been blogging about the experience and posting photos on our research project website at https://rangechange.ca. I’ll get back to some more Hood River posts here soon, and hopefully I can fit in my snowshoeing trip too before my adventures for this summer begin. Planning is in full swing!

I’ll leave you with one teaser – many more photos on the RangeChange.ca website!

Our camp on an esker beside the Snake River which flows into MacKay Lake. We stayed here two nights – we were constantly moving to reach new research sites.

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.).

Last Caribou in the Hood?

Camping, Canoeing, Tundra, Wildlife

Sunday, February 3rd, 2019

If we’d done this trip twenty years ago there’s a good chance we’d have canoed through herds of thousands of caribou. The north is peppered with stories of watching thousands of caribou stream past for hours, but not recently (at least in this part of the arctic). The Hood River is in the Bathurst Caribou range – it actually flows right through the traditional calving grounds, although those may be changing a bit too. We were hoping to see caribou on this trip, but we knew the chances of seeing a large herd was small. In 1986 the Bathurst herd was around 500,000 caribou, in 2015 it was 20,000 and today it is 8,200 (source).

In late June we pulled our canoes over the last bit of ice on Esker Lake. We got to the end of Esker Lake and camped on a large point of sand covered with Mountain Aven (white flowers with a yellow center). Although it was a lot of work hauling our gear up the sandy bank, the camping spot was spectacular. After camp was set up, supper cooked and everyone fed, most people headed to bed. I was tired, but I couldn’t pass up a short hike. As I walked up the sandy ridge (I don’t actually think it was an esker – it was too large of a sandy area) I admired the large ice-covered delta where a small river flowed out into a bay on the lake. I got to a high point and sat down to appreciate the view. Then I spotted something moving.

There was a lone caribou picking its way over the ice of the delta. I watched for a while – it was slowly getting closer to our camp. I’d heard about someone holding up their arms too look like caribou horns so caribou wouldn’t be scared of them and I thought I’d try it even though the caribou was still at least 500m away. I stood up and put my arms up. I saw it turn its head towards me and pause. And then it started running – towards me!

I was surprised, but I kept my hands up as much as I could while still snapping a couple pictures. The caribou ran across the delta, right in between the tents in our camp and up the ridge towards me. It got really close and I couldn’t resist – I dropped my arms to take some photos. And the caribou stopped. I’d lost my antlers and now it didn’t know what to make of me. It studied me for a minute, tilted its head this way and that, and eventually decided that I wasn’t a caribou. I may be anthropomorphizing, but that was the saddest caribou I could imagine trotting away from me. It went over a rise and disappeared.

I felt so sorry for that lonely guy. He looked so hopeful for a friend and I’d let him down.

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.