![]() ![]() Sure the park was packed full of tourists and that was definitely a turn off but what I discovered that day not only changed my mind about the park, it ignited a creative spark inside of me. On July 24th we headed south out of Bozeman MT and entered Yellowstone National Park through West Yellowstone, thus beginning a love affiair with a landscape unlike any other I had ever seen and most likely will see for that matter. It was always a place I said I wouldn’t mind seeing but it wasn’t very high on my list due to all the aforementioned reasons. Yellowstone National Park is extremely popular, packed with tourists, well photographed and extremely hyped and was always a place I felt indifferent toward when it came to landscapes I must visit. It was that night as we had dinner in Bozeman that we made the decision to add an extra day to the trip and visit the most famous and first of the U.S. We followed 90 through Washington and Idaho arriving in Bozeman Montana on July 23rd. and eventually picking up I 90 out of Seattle. On July 21st we set out for home, driving down I 5 from Vancouver back into the U.S. I found the simplicity of the Canadian Badlands easier to distill down to a simple frame, with its mono tonalities and simple shapes however the Canadian Rockies although extremely beautiful, I found to be overwhelming and complex and this being my first visit I struggled to find a photographic connection. ![]() The other factor was that although both of these landscapes are breathtaking, I was having a hard time making a connection. This is due to a few factors one of which was as I stated in the beginning of this post it was a family trip to unfamiliar landscapes. I broke out the Mamiya in both Dinosaur and Jasper but only managed to expose 2 rolls of film the entire trip. and enjoyed every stretch of road along the way. We spent 4 nights in Dinosaur Provincial Park, 6 nights in Jasper National Park, 4 nights in Vancouver B.C. On July 5th 2018 we packed up our 4wd Ford Escape with all of our camping gear and of course the Mamiya 7II outfit and headed northwest into the great Canadian west. It was an easy sell to my family as the Royal Tyrrell museum of Paleontology is not far away and every 8 year old loves dinosaurs so to the roster it was added. The park appealed to me due to the striking resemblance to the Badlands of South Dakota, it’s a spitting image. As I began to plan the trip I discovered an area in Alberta about 2 hours east of Calgary called Dinosaur Provincial Park. ![]() The plan was to overland it and camp in Jasper National Park with a few stays in hotels along the way to “clean up”. The area of interest was the Canadian west and more specifically, the Canadian Rockies and the city of Vancouver in British Columbia. ![]() Of course photography was always on the agenda but the central purpose was to visit areas of North America that we had not yet experienced. In early January 2018, as the year was just getting underway, I decided that as a family we needed to undertake a great North American road trip. A journey that would ignite a love affair, and prompt a 2nd visit in a little over a month. These early trips were really geared around family but on the horizon I knew an epic journey lay in wait. The year started off with a road trip in March to visit family in North Carolina and then on to southwest Florida. Travel not just for photographic purposes but also for family adventure, although fortunately for my own selfish reasons photography was always at least part of each adventure. 2018 has been a remarkable year for me, and this is no doubt attributed to the amount of travel to new destinations I have experienced. ![]()
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