An unusually mild November gave me itchy feet last week, so I did a road trip up to the Tawatinaw Valley north of Edmonton. I connected with the gravel road at Nestow just off Highway 2A after an hour long drive in the dark. I had no goal in mind, so I slowly cruised up the road in the pre-dawn light, admiring the glow of the birch and aspen groves as they reflected back the car’s headlights. I was keeping watch on the eastern sky as I drove, looking for a spot where I could find a birch grove backlit by the rosy morning light. I was imagining this photograph: the pale trunks of a birch or aspen grove painted with light from a hand-held flashlight and the red glow of dawn behind. But the valley slope and the morning light did not coincide with my imaginings, and I drove on.
The Tawatinaw Valley is a glacial remnant. While today the river flows north to the Athabasca river, geological evidence indicates that it originally flowed south, a tunnel valley that had formed beneath the retreating Laurentide Ice Sheet 12 000 years ago¹. Today the valley road provides a pleasant drive through farmland and ranches interspersed with natural forest. I stopped at a Watchable Wildlife (a now apparently defunct attempt by the Alberta Government’s Sustainable Resource Dept. to hi-lite areas of natural interest) location and walked down to a viewing platform overlooking some of the small lakes that are dotted here and there up and down the valley. I took some photographs using a split field neutral density filter to help equalize the light between the shadowed foreground and the sunlit shore behind.
(N.B. — I am trying to remedy the problem with the blurred look of the landscape photograph — I am at a loss to understand why WordPress sometimes displays photos this way as the original is sharp. Click to enlarge for a better view)
We have had an extraordinarily mild November this year. The autumn color is long gone and the bright orange-yellow fall color of the distant tamarack trees are now a rusty-brown. There are a few Natural Areas² in this region to explore, one near the town of Opal is said to be good tiger beetle country, so I will be exploring this area more frequently in the spring.
Equipment:
Nikon D80, Nikon 18-200mm VR Zoom Lens, Singh-Ray Galen Rowell Filter ND-2G-HS
References:




















