Epic Shooting, part II

Picture yourself here….

A few years ago (probably more than a few now that I think about it, but lets maintain this fiction that it wasn’t), I went up to the Cardinal Divide, south of Hinton, which in turn is a few hours south of Grande Prairie (he says, hoping that it will help with SEO). The area is best known as the place where water on one side of the divide flows north to the Arctic ocean, while water on the other flows east to Hudson’s Bay (arguably also the Arctic Ocean, but large enough to be its own water body).

I drove up from Grave Flats (before the road was washed out a decade ago, sigh). The day I went was cloudy with some spattering rain. As I began to climb in earnest up to the pass, I entered the clouds and by the time I hit the top, I could barely see more than a few feet. I got out of the car, looked around at the grey, featureless void around me and sighed. I took a few steps, but worried that I might not be able to find my way back to my car, the fog was so thick.

I even wrote the start of a song about the experience.

They say that you can see forever, on a clear day
But today the fog lies all around, cool and damp and grey
That you could see all the way to heaven, when your head’s not in the clouds
But I can’t see much of that today, stuck in this misty shroud.

As you can tell, the moment was both inspiring and uninspiring. Here I had driven hours to get to this amazing location, only to be completely socked in.

But the area keeps calling out to me, so when I started offering Epic Backcountry Boudoir trips to the Hinton area, the Cardinal Divide was the spot that I was planning on going to.

This year, I had my first shoot there, and it was all that I could have hoped for and more. I don’t have permission from the client to share images (yet), but these are a couple shots of the scenery from there.

I also wanted to describe the day, for anyone who is thinking that it involves hiking marathon distances uphill.

Or rather, days, as you spend two nights in the Rocky Mountainview Bed and Breakfast. My clients stayed in the beautiful log cabin there the first night to relax and recharge, and we set out at about 9 am the next morning for our day’s shoot.

Getting to the Cardinal Divide can be accomplished in a 2wd vehicle, though the road gets quite rough, especially as you get to the top. (The client decided to drive her own SUV up. She stopped and said it was getting a little rough about two minutes from the parking lot; when I mentioned this, she decided to keep going and made it without incident. I do have a Ram 1500 that clients can catch a ride in if the road is too rough.) From the parking lot you can go west (everybody goes west) or east. It’s 1.3 km up to the top of the ridge. You can hike up and down the ridge, but we basically set up where we hit the ridge. It’s a stiff climb, but not ridiculously so, and might take half an hour or so if you didn’t want to get too hot and sweaty.

We shot up top for about an hour and a half, but it can get windy up there, and she started to get cold, so we moved down to the meadows, which are maybe 300 m or so from the parking lot. Despite our proximity to the lot, nobody came that way, and nobody could see us from there. We had lunch, provided by Mountain Grazing Co, took some photos of her cavorting in the meadows, then began heading downhill.

On the way up, I had spotted some interesting openings in the trees, and we stopped at one of those, which was full of wildflowers, and shot there for an hour. We also stopped and shot in some fireweed on the side of the road (side note: this year was the most awesome fireweed year I’ve seen, and I would have gladly shot a thousand times in the fireweed. I love fireweed.) Then continued down to Hinton for supper.

Typically, the plan would be to return to the cabin to do some more traditional boudoir shots there, but the client told me of a spot she had found while exploring the day before, down by the river. So we went there and it was amazing. We stayed until the sun went down, before she returned back to the Bed and Breakfast.

The photos are amazing. Unfortunately, until I get permission, all I can do is share these few scenic shots.