Images of a World in Flux

Wild spaces are inhabited and always changing. I try to reflect that in my photography.

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Birds on a wire.

These were mostly a lens test from last spring(?). That patch of clear blue sky was directly over my neighbor's driveway.

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The berries are almost done, but the Devil's Club leaves are brilliant yellow.

Northern BC has a love/hate relationship with Devil's Club. The spines are sharp, painful, and hard to remove, but the bark is valued for its medicinal properties. It's medicinal uses most often appear in Indigenous medicine, but my grandmother swears the best topical she ever had for her arthritis was a Devil's Club salve a friend gave her.

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Initials carved into a fallen tree. Honestly, this is the ideal place for people to leave a piece of themselves in this park. Unlike names carved into the boardwalk railings it doesn't affect infrastructure, and a fallen log can't be hurt by incisions into it's trunk. Additionally, since this is a cedar log, it will resist rot and serve as a reminder of the people who visited the park in the past. We can already see plants and lichen getting a foothold in the letters; some day this will probably be followed by seedlings as the trunk breaks down and becomes a nurse log.

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More winter pictures.

Ice on the Murray River near Tumbler Ridge, BC.

These are some of the last pictures of 2019, before the entire world went sideways...

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There's nothing quite like a prairie sky...

These were taken on a cold, early morning while I was visiting my friend's farm for winter break. The first is framed over an empty hay field, the second features some equipment and the old wood-heated greenhouse (which is still in use, and still wood heated through the spring frost).

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An Arbutus tree spirals above a lakeside path on Vancouver Island.

I drive past this lake every time I go back to my family's property on the coast. Arbutus are pretty rare in my home town, but there's a few of them around the lake. They're very sensitive trees, and can die from disturbances like an overly aggressive pruning. They make up a striking part of the coastal landscape, both aesthetically and culturally, especially on the eastern side of Vancouver Island.

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The cool spray and warm sun distract visitors from the concerns of covid-19 in summer 2020.

So many people were rushing to avoid human contact in the great outdoors that we didn't go a minute without encountering another person in the Meligne Canyon.

But more importantly than an escape from society, the park provided a mediating environment, where families could bond without fear, strangers could exchange greetings distanced and unmasked, and people could take in sights that weren't the other side of their living rooms for a change.

For a few days at least, Jasper was a place people could experience a semblance of normalcy in the middle of a global disaster.

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I like the photos from this trip, because it shows how much you can hide behind a camera. This is a little park off the highway, with the parking area so close to the falls you can see them from your car. I stop here to walk my dog every time I drive through the Rockies.

As a matter of fact, the waterfall is so close to the parking lot it went right through it that spring...

By setting the debris behind me, I can frame the falls as picturesque and untouched Nature. You wouldn't even know there was a parking lot behind me, let alone that the beautiful creek in the photos ripped it to pieces.

But if I frame it differently it tells a totally different story. Sometimes when nature and development clash, nature wins. Beauty is often found in power, and power can be destructive. The interplay of nature and culture is complicated, and if we frame our shots to remove the human element - and how it is impacted by and impacts nature - we only tell half the story.

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This little shrine was at the back of our campsite in Jasper. Most of the photos I took of it came out blurry (probably because I wasn't very familiar with the camera yet), which convinced P it was haunted.

Haunted or not, it sat behind our tents the entire time we stayed there, a leftover from earlier visitors.

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The table in this old trapper's cabin is set, welcoming visitors at the halfway stop of a day hike route.

The cabin was in use in the 1940s, its residents owing their success in part to the nearby freshwater spring, which provides cool, clear water, even when surrounding ponds are frozen in winter.

The site is well-travelled, but also respected. The trappers who lived here didn't set that table, or patch up holes in the windows and roof. This park hasn't been a trap line in decades, but no one has knocked the cabin down in that time. On the contrary, it has become a the destination of this trail, a place to visit and take a break, a sign in the depths of the woods that people were here, people belonged here, and in some ways they still do.

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Ever wonder what western Canada looked like to the first people who lived here?

Probably something like the river valleys around Jasper! The glaciers here receded so recently that you can still see them in the distance in this picture. The plant life is sparse and hardy, fireweed is abundant (you can see the pink of its flowers in the distance), and most of the ground is sand and gravel rather than organic soil. This landscape simultaneously feels young and new and unspeakably ancient.

This would have been a hard landscape to live on (a lot of the resources people relied heavily on later weren't established yet), but we know people were there. They followed herds of bison up the Rockies as the ice cleared, and probably started moving into the interior between the mountains and the coast as soon as the glaciers melted and the glacial lakes started to drain (although possibly also on these lakes with boats as well).

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Sailboats at a small harbour near Vancouver. I was burning time while my sister was at a dentist appointment nearby. Her dentist has a much better view than mine...

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Sailboats at a small harbour near Vancouver. I was burning time while my sister was at a dentist appointment nearby. Her dentist has a much better view than mine...

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Driftwood sculptures are a time-honored tradition on the Pacific coast. Since the park management banned vehicles and campsites from the beaches (back in the day hippies used to live on the beach all summer, complete with their trucks/vans and tents) driftwood building has become the primary lasting evidence of human presence here. You can find everything from this sort of standing sculpture to little cabins build on top of the rocks or at the high tide line.

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This is one of my favorite shots from last year's trip to Jasper. There were a lot of hikers along the canyon trail, so I got some good pictures of people interacting with the landscape.