The Quiet Picture

Thursday, my last morning in Canada! All that remained of my holiday was to drive to the harbour, wait, take the ferry to Vancouver, get across the town to the airport, wait, board the flight to Heathrow, wait, transfer to the Arlanda plane, wait, take the train to Hudiksvall, wait, switch to the Ljusdal bus, cruise home in my beautiful new car, and then wait again to wind down enough to get some sleep. All of that in a mere 32 hours without a wink of sleep and when I finally did get some shuteye, it was already Saturday!

Time to begin the journey home and drive across the island to our last overnight stop at Nanaimo. But I’d rather go out with a bang, so I got another chance to photograph some aquatic life at Pacific Rim, and then to top it all off, we had a lucky encounter with an otter at Kennedy Lake. It was as wonderful as it was unexpected! The otter stayed a bit too far for my 300mm lens but I really don’t care. Would you believe that I’m more thrilled about these long shots at an otter than the close shots of a grizzly bear? Funny how it goes sometimes.

Pacific Rim National Park Reserve - that’s our primary Vancouver Island destination. We were both eager to see the coastal rain forest, so that was our first stop of the day. There are just short and easy hikes here and they don’t get much easier than the Rain Forest trail, but photography is just that much harder then. It was a bright sunny day and the light that was filtering through the trees provided nightmarish lighting conditions - photographically speaking, that is. Otherwise it was very beautiful, and in the end I was able to make use the patchy light. You just have to be very quick, because one moment the light is here and the next it’s gone. I did a sequence of pictures and you can see the light changing, even if it’s not even a minute between the frames.

Having done the forest, we headed to the beach. I had been looking forward to it, as I thought that the flotsam would provide endless photo ops. Well, I was partly right - there was some flotsam, and the photo ops… were somewhat limited. Anyway, I did enjoy just walking out there, even if I’m a land-dweller by nature and the big horizon bothers me more than fascinates.

We finished the day by trying to shoot the sunset. That was straight out of the book of do-nots of photography - we had done absolutely zero scouting ahead and we had only minutes to find the right spot. So of course we never got it but just ended up shooting a forest silhouette from the docks at Tofino.

Vancouver Island is a great place if you want to do whale watching, so we drove to Telegraph Cove in the northern Vancouver Island to catch a tour. It had been a foggy morning and we were a bit worried that we would lose all the whales in the fog, but as our departure got closer, the sun started to come out. When we got out to the sea, the fog intensified momentarily again but it created a magical atmosphere for my first encounter with the orcas. I actually heard them before I saw them - the puffing sound they make when they blow out just before surfacing. And then finally, the black fins started appearing from the fog, wonderful! We spent a while with the orcas but apparently there were a bit sleepy and we mostly just saw the fins and a little bit of their backs.

We then moved on to check out humpback whales instead and now I was able to see a fluke, it was in the distance but it’s the only fluke I’ve ever seen so I will remember it!

The whalewatching tour was good for other marine life as well - we got to see harbor seals and sea lions. Again, the first ones I’ve ever seen.

We had an early wake-up call (4:00) to catch the ferry from Bella Coola to Port Hardy on the Vancouver Island. After a few hours of sailing, the captain came on the speakers and announced that he had probably taken the right turn from Bella Coola and he thinks he now knows where we are. Well that’s comforting. Canadian humour, eh? I wondered if he’d like to borrow my GPS.

The first two thirds of the cruise had been on calm waters and lukewarm scenery. It probably would’ve looked nice otherwise but for the high cloud so despite the sunshine, the sky had a dull colour that I didn’t bother to shoot. But then after we reached open sea, the wind picked up - a lot. I had to risk grabbing some dinner because I was hungry, but the ship was swaying too much for me to even attempt to carry my soup to the table so I got help (they were very understanding!). Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to get soup anyway… this is the first time I’ve ever had to chase my food around the table. But then the swaying subsided as we approached Port Hardy and we actually got there ahead of schedule, at 22:15 instead of 00:45. We didn’t complain.

So, this cruise is known as the Discovery Passage. Can’t say we discovered a lot. Boredom, mostly.

After Grey Wells yesterday, the scenery started changing from the mountaineous to the hilly and it kept that way after Williams Lake as well. We did start seeing some great autumn colours though and it was a calm day so colours reflected nicely on the roadside lakes.

Then inevitably we came to what the locals call The Hill. This is where you have to descend from 1500 metres to sea level, and just about all of it takes place during a 10 km drive on switchbacking gravel road with a steep canyon on your left, so the margin of error isn’t exactly big. When we stopped after about 1100 metres of those 1500, the brakes were smelling rather ominously… but they held just fine and we made it safely down.

I had heard that there might be on opportunity to see grizzly bears near Bella Coola. After asking for directions, we headed for one of these grizzly spots and after some waiting, sure enough a grizzly bear was making its way up the river, catching salmon! The light was just awful though, direct backlight, so the pictures look like ink blot tests but at least the ink blot is recognisably a bear.

Since we heard that there are a lot of bears around and it’s just a matter of waiting, we stayed there for a couple of hours more but all we saw was a black bear in the distance, and a bald eagle that I had the fortune to capture on pixels. This is the first bald eagle - well, wild anyway - that I have ever seen! It is also the first panning shot I’ve ever really succeeded with, even if the image on the left is a serious crop from the original for composition purposes.

Of course, the morning we have to leave Jasper is the morning that is sunny. But can’t help it… At least we saw some nice morning scenery on the way, and even spotted some moose - they are the bigger cousins of the moose we have at home, so it was special. Mt Robson was also showing itself this morning; often it’s shrouded in its own weather system so we got a lucky break.

We made a small detour to the Wells Grey Provincial Park to check out a few waterfalls. The Dawson Falls were wonderful - I went closeup crazy, barely remembered to take a photo which actually shows the whole falls. And then we drove to the Helmcken Falls, no complaints there either. I’m glad I finally got my waterfall fix!

All that remained was the boring drive to Williams Lake for our overnight stopover on the way to Bella Coola. At least they have free WiFi at the motel and I have time on my hands to update the blog.

Jasper is really getting washed out. Yet another rainy morning, so we used it for treating ourselves to a pancake and maple syrup breakfast. It was good. Then we did a short hike at Cottonwood Slough, tried a few photos but it was forced. Now it was just a matter of killing time until lunch, so I thought I would check out the road towards Edmonton. Got lucky straight away - a group of elk, a bull with 8 cows!

I spent over an hour shooting them, even if it was a big distance to cover even for 300mm x 1.4 and the angle was bit wrong. But I wanted to see if I could get some good behaviour shots and maybe they would even mate… but no. So I continued driving and then it started raining. The scenery got just simply stunning, no big mountains in sight but lovely green lakes by the road, with small spruce covered islands and autumn yellow reeds and grasses. It was heartbreaking not be able to photograph it, I can only imagine how beautiful it could be in other weather - all I needed was the raining to slow down to a drizzle, but it just wasn’t to be.

And later in the day we saw another coyote. But that was it, I have a memory card full of elk and very little else from this place called Jasper.

It has to be that I always have bad weather when I’m in Jasper… I think it was overcast, drizzly and cold here when I was here back then. We checked out the Cavell Lake but of course there wasn’t any glorious morning light to speak of. So we drove to Maligne Lake and now there was a bit of wind as well… forget photography. On the way back I snapped a few shots of whitewater. The only wildlife we saw was whitetail deer. And elk in the morning.

Time to move on to Jasper, via Icefields Parkway. I had high exceptations and I guess that it was my downfall - the weather didn’t co-operate 100% so I just felt let down and only took a handful of pictures, mostly at Peyto Lake.

We checked in at the Mount Edith Cavell wilderness hostel at dusk, and rustic it was indeed… with outhouses, gas lights and log fires.