Icefields Parkway

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On the border of Alberta and British Columbia is a group of four national parks (Yoho, Kootenay, Banff, and Jasper) and a few provincial parks that collectively make up the Canadian Rocky Mountains World Heritage Site. I entered through the town of Radium Hot Springs into Kootenay. The scenery was pretty incredible:

At a road junction there were a bunch of people pulled over taking photos of this elk grazing on a small tree behind a cabin:

A woman walked out the back door, massed around with some things on the ground for 30 seconds or so, then strolled off past her car before she noticed all the people watching, then saw the 600 pound animal that had been standing 6 feet away from her. Here she shouts through the window to her husband, who comes and looks out the back door:

Past the town of Lake Louise the grand mountain scenery picks up again, even better than before. This part of highway 93 between Banff and Jasper is called the Icefields Parkway, and it's turned up to 11:

The sun was setting, which made good light on the mountains so far, but unfortunately meant it got dark before I even made it halfway down the parkway, so I have no idea what I even missed out on. I made it to turquoise-colored (due to glacial sediments) Bow Lake just after sunset, where the crescent Moon was just above Bow Glacier and Bow Glacier Falls, and these pictures don't do justice to the scene:

Next time:

Montana and Glacier

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After Yellowstone I drove north through western Montana, which is really quite pretty, much to my surprise. This place is called 'Gates of the Mountains', and I'm sure it's pretty neat if you have a boat so you can explore through the gates upstream:

More Montana driving:

It was mostly these treeless, windswept plains, until I got to the town of East Glacier, just outside Glacier National Park. It literally changed into a dense taiga forest within a few miles.

I had to grab a shot of this sign in East Glacier:

I went through Glacier on the 'Going to the Sun' road, which is supposed to be one of the best drives in North America. Here's some kind of rodent (chipmunk?) I spotted at one of my stops:

The east side of the park was spotty overcast, making pictures of the mountain scenery difficult (dull grey clouds make a poor background). I stopped and shot a few waterfalls, though it was hard trying to find angles that didn't have much sky in them:

One I got over the pass and to the west side, the sky cleared out a bit and conditions were perfect:

The road descends into a very dense forested area:

I wanted to get out and explore but all the parking lots were full. Maybe I should have taken one of the park buses:

After coming out of West Glacier I continued north:

To be continued!

Yellowstone

-as always, click any photo for technical details and larger sizes-

I've been to Yellowstone a few times before, but only in the winter when some of the park roads are closed, so I'd never seen the geysers. Crazy, I know. So my first direction was toward Old Faithful. Driving through the geyser basins on the way there, it looked like there were fires all over the place. It was steam from the geysers. Everywhere!

I got back to Old Faithful and decided to do a time lapse of an eruption event, 15 minutes in 30 seconds. So I set up the camera to shoot 1 frame per second, and ended up running out of time and restarting the sequence because the eruption was late. So after sitting there for 30 minutes listening to the 'click ... click ... click' of my camera, Old Faithful finally erupted, and some oblivious people ran right out and stood in front of my camera to watch it. Effort ruined. I at least got to watch the eruption with my eyeballs.

After that, I walked up onto the hill behind Old Faithful, where there are a plethora of other springs and geysers on various schedules. I watched a few small (~4 foot) eruptions and generally had a difficult time trying to shoot them. It's a dynamic event that doesn't translate to a still photo very well. That's why I wanted to time lapse Old Faithful. Well, here's a spring, anyway:

I spent about an hour and a half wandering around among the geysers, and it was time for Old Faithful to erupt again! So I set my camera up again, this time in a spot no one could mess up the shot, and managed to get a 900-shot sequence filmed just like I wanted. The background clouds and sky made this one even better than the one I (tried) to film earlier. No video to show yet, though, as I haven't had time to mess with it yet. I hope it turns out!

Drove past Yellowstone Lake:

And ran into a traffic jam due to Buffalo standing in the road:

Here's a feature called 'Dragon's Tongue' (I think) that is constantly sloshing waves in and out of the hole:

Then I got to Lower Yellowstone Falls:

I saw a sign for 'Norris Geyser Basin' and turned in, and would you guess what they have there? More geysers and springs!

I read somewhere that Yellowstone has more geysers and hot springs than the entire rest of the world combined. I could almost believe it...

I stopped by the 'Boiling River', where a (very!) hot spring flows into a cold river, and you can soak in it an control your temperature by where you stand in the flow. 100 times better than a hot tub. I sat in it for about an hour, then left just in time to shoot a setting-sun:

'Don't shoot into the sun' is one of those rules that I usually have good luck when I break it. I had to use HDR on that shot, though.

Leaving the park, the sun was dropping behind the mountains to the west and casting neat light on the mountains to the east, so here's one more:

And that's that for now. I shot several hundred pictures, and when I get the chance I'll go through them again. I know there are more good ones in there...

The First Two Days

Well, I'm on my way to Fairbanks. The first day of driving was almost entirely down I-40, so few pictures, I was mostly set on getting down the road.

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I got to Shiprock, New Mexico right about sundown, and grabbed a couple of shots of the rock formations.

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Shiprock is on the Navajo Nation, and I saw one fellow standing on top of one of the smaller formations watching the sun go down. Unfortunately, picture was blurry.

I arrived at Arches National Park about midnight, and decided to walk out to Delicate Arch and see if I could get lucky and catch a meteor in a shot with it. I pulled up at the trail and was the only person there (of course, it's midnight!) and noticed a sign about how mountain lions hunt in this territory. I though 'Hmm, they probably hunt at night' and started to reconsider walking out there by myself. Then, 3 college age guys and a girl pulled up and said they were about to walk the trail. I was eating freeze-dried beef stew so I told them I'd catch up with them when I was done.

They ended up with about a 5 minute head start on me, but I caught up pretty quickly because they were having trouble following the trail. If you've never done any desert hiking, it can be confusing because there's no worn-down path from all the people who went before, it's all just rock. What they do is set up small pyramids of rocks (called cairns) every so often, and you just walk from one to the next. So we all moved pretty quick after I caught up and found the trail for them.

(Delicate Arch is such a heavy-use trail that there actually is a worn-down path from the thousands of people who walk it every year, that looks like smoother-than-normal rock. But it's hard to see in the dark if you don't know what you're looking for.)

This was my third time hiking this trail, and the third time it kicked my ass. It's only 3 miles round-trip, but there's a 800 foot (I think) elevation gain up slickrock, almost as steep as a set of stairs. That's an 80 story building. Carrying all my camera gear and light stands on my back. I like this trail a lot because you never see the arch until right at the end, you turn a corner and it's just there, a 50-foot arch right in front of you.

The other guys laid on the rock while I took some pictures:

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Never got that meteor :(

The other guys took off back to the car while I was still shooting, so I had to hike out by myself. I didn't think about that because I've hiked by myself many times, even in the dark. But something about how this whole desert landscape was so different started making me paranoid. I was thinking about mountain lions the whole way back to the car, seeing lion ghosts stalking me out of the corner of my eyes, just waiting for me to drop my guard. Of course, there were none*, and I made it back. Creepiest hike I've done in a while, though.

*none I saw, anyway. I heard once that you're about 100 times more likely to be seen by a mountain lion than to see one. They just watch you pass by from the shadows and most people never know.

I passed by a sunrise shot in Canyonlands I've been planning for months because it was still hours till dawn and I wanted to get down the road.

Continued through the Targhee National Forest and snapped this out the window:

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Then into the town of West Yellowstone, got a room and slept. Woke up early this morning and watched Old Faithful erupt against the stars and meteors, I was the only person out there. Driving back to my motel, I saw the dawn twilight reflecting off the Madison River and had to stop and take a picture:

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That's Orion rising over the hill to the right.

Here's the same scene with a passing car lighting up the trees and fog.

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Alright, I'm getting off the computer and going Yellowstone-ing.