The Icefields Adventure

   In September of 2016, I embarked on an epic one-month road trip with my good friend and photographer Jared. We started in Seattle, Washington and went to Glacier National Park, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Badlands, and then up to Banff and Jasper in Canada, finally passing through Vancouver, BC before heading back home to Seattle. We were both excited as neither of us had ever been on a road trip of this magnitude, and I had never car camped for such a long period before. We had tons of crazy days exploring new places with insane weather, but I'd like to share with you one day we spent driving from Banff to Jasper, stopping all along the way whenever we saw something we wanted to photograph.

    Some of my favorite things to photograph are roads. Roads are everywhere, and they come in all sorts of shapes, widths, and textures, but in certain places at just the right times they can deliver some of the most beautiful sights. I enjoy pulling beauty out of seemingly mundane scenes, and I love to stop on highways because the places I stop are likely the first time someone has stopped at that exact location. In a world saturated with so many incredible creatives out there, it is comforting to know that what I may be creating is the first or only time it will ever be created.

    This photograph was taken on such an occasion. We were fortunate to have arrived in Canada the day it started snowing, so we got the first photos of snowfall there this year. When we saw the incredible Banff mountains in the rearview, we just had to stop. I had never seen anything so simply grand before. As the last light licked the tips of the mountains, I walked to the center of the road and snapped a few photos before just sitting back and enjoying the view.