This Isn't for Me

After failing to come home from Hawaii with anything worth hanging on a wall, I was determined to keep improving. Monte was going on a photo workshop in Canada and talked me into joining him. It was fall 2006, and it was my first trip out of the country and first organized photography trip.

There were about 15 of us, based out of Banff, for a week.

The first evening we went to Vermilion Lakes. The highway ran right behind us, and it was loud. Down at the water everyone was in small groups, talking, taking the same picture as the person beside them. I climbed a bank to get a different angle. I remember looking around and thinking, What am I doing? This doesn't feel like my gig. How did I let Monte talk me into this?

I barely took a picture that night. I didn't care enough to. It was noisy, nothing in front of me was intriguing enough to capture my attention, and the camera still felt like anything but second nature. I didn't know what I wanted to shoot, or whether I even wanted to keep grinding to learn how. And it was only the first night of a full week.

The next day was Johnston Canyon, a lot of people packed into a narrow box of rock. Pretty, and I still wasn't feeling it. What I remember is Monte stepping back, falling into the creek with his big pack on, and not being able to get up. He looked like a turtle flipped on its shell. The water was maybe six inches deep. So I did what any good friend would do. I laughed. He never let me live that one down.

At Moraine Lake one of the instructors explained hyperfocal distance, and for a minute something caught. It had been raining. There were bright canoes on turquoise water, and every peak was buried in cloud. I got every canoe shot out of focus. Then we stood on the rock pile with dozens of other people and waited for the clouds to clear. They didn't.

It was a beginner workshop, and I was a beginner. I had a lot of book theory and very little field time, and the questions going around weren't the ones I had. It was the wrong week for me, and I was starting to think it was the wrong hobby.

Lake O'Hara is hard to reach. You can only get there on foot or on a bus that runs on permits. We had seats. It was raining again. I stood on the shore with the whole group inside a fifteen-foot stretch of bank and thought, This still isn't for me.

By then Monte knew I wasn't feeling it. So we left the group and went exploring on our own. We climbed toward the overlooks above the lake, stopping at streams and tarns on the way. The rain turned to snow as we went higher. Up on the Opabin Plateau the larches had gone gold, with fresh snow on them. I didn't get anything worth keeping up there, only a vivid memory and a card full of misses. I was soaked and cold. It was quiet, there was no one around, and it was amazing.

That night we told the instructors we'd go our own way for the rest of the week. They were good about it. One of them told us about a location he thought we'd like, a long climb from an unmarked pullout that wasn't on the group's plan.

The rest of the week we set our own pace. It was a blur, and we went everywhere. Peyto Lake, Takakkaw Falls, Emerald Lake, and dozens of others along the way. And we found his location, a stream climbing through the trees to waterfalls with peaks behind them. No crowd, and no sign telling you it was worth seeing. That was the first time I understood that the places I wanted were the ones that didn't beg for attention.

I ruined far more pictures than I kept. I came home with a couple I still like, and a lot that were almost. But the trip that started with me at the lake's edge in a crowd, deciding this wasn't for me, is the one that started twenty years of chasing the next place and the next experience. I've been back to the Canadian Rockies many times since. I still think about that first trip. It was a coin flip from being my last.