Mount Chester, 02 Sep 2022.
Sustained slab scrambling, the kind that makes you forget the summit comes at all.
Autumn in K-Country: quietly sublime.

The lads and I savouring a lunch break on the summit of Mount Kidd on 27May2023. My son, Yuri and I, have stared up at this beast for many years on our KCountry adventures. It was nice to finally tickle her back with our hiking boots.

Mount Rae, August 2021.
After several attempts, Yuri and I finally stood on the summit.
The ridge asks for focus, with moments of real exposure near the top.
A meaningful place to mark my 55th birthday.

Blue Rock Mountain, Kananaskis 2021.
An early exploration of hand-stencilled lettering meeting journal fragments.

HNY2026 postcard. 4.25”x 8.5”. I’ve been making New Year’s cards since 1992, and every year feels like a sacred ritual. This image finally came together on a cloudless October day in 2021, after years of chasing this exact side view of The Fortress. Some images don’t do deadlines. Mission accomplished. Yuri and the moon show up to steal the scene.

HNY2025 card. 4.25” x 5.75”.
I found a stack of 4×5 Polaroids from my early days in the mid-90s. They still feel perfect in the hand. This card borrows their shape and weight.

The image was made in July 2024 on the ridge walk between Windsor Mountain and Castle Peak. Yuri is my subject, big surprise

4” x 12” tri-fold card mailed in a white envelope.
Ghost Peak is a magical mountain, and this day was no exception. The full moon watched over us as we made our early morning commute from Calgary to the Rockies. After ten hours of wind, snow, and rock, the moon guided our return. Days like this make me feel deeply grateful.

HNY2023 postcard. 6” x 6”.
This image of Yuri was captured just below Mount Rae’s summit in August 2021, on a hazy day in the Rockies. It remains one of my favorite images because that ascent felt impossible when we first started hiking and scrambling years earlier. When we finally reached the top, it felt quietly sacred.

Castle Peak, June 2024.
More stencil lettering experiments. Yuri, once again, is the subject.

Victoria Peak, Castle Wilderness, September 2023.
Andrew Nugara calls this the best ridge walk in the Canadian Rockies. Hiking it with Yuri and Mindy, we didn’t argue. We were utterly enchanted: clouds and shadows dancing across the ridge, the scree a wild riot of colour, and Windsor and Castle teasing us from the distance.

The ridge walk from Windsor Mountain to Castle Peak reveals some of the strangest geology I’ve encountered. Hoodoo-like, but bigger in scale and far weirder in form. Proof that the mountains have a sense of humour.

Yuri making the über windy traverse from Windsor Mountain to Castle Peak in June 2023. I shot a million frames that day and still wished for more. This place continues to move me in ways I can’t fully explain.

Castle Peak from the summit of Windsor Mountain, June 2024.
I love how the horizon line slips right through Castle Peak’s “toes,” like the mountains are gently balancing each other.

This is the Hawkins Horseshoe. The best “hike” in the Canadian Rockies, hands down, with 22 km, 2183 m of elevation gain, and three summits. If you’re truly into hiking and scrambling, it’s nothing short of a pilgrimage.

Yuri scaling the incomparable Mount Edith in Banff National Park. I’ve used a tighter crop before, but this version shows the full story and the scale of the moment.

The incomparable view from the summit of Mount Wilcox in Jasper National Park. This gigapixel pano was captured in June 2023 during our first Peak Week. The fresh snow made the climb harder, but it also felt like a gentle reminder that the mountains always arrive with their own grace.

Devil’s Head, Ghost River area. For over 20 years this peak has lived in my windshield on the way to the Rockies. It feels like an old friend. The lads stand on the summit, backlit and small against the vastness, and this image finally captures the sense of scale and reverence I’ve carried for so long.

Devil’s Head, Ghost River area. Same day as the last image. The lads stand in the lower right, small as a thought against the sky.

I carried my studio camera and tripod up there to capture a photograph I’d been holding in my mind for years, a quiet homage to Ansel Adams. The day asked a lot of us, and I stopped here, listening to my limits and the weight of the terrain.

The image is strong, though I still feel the pull to have moved higher and closer to the cliff. I was shooting wide, using camera movements to hold the mountain’s scale and presence, and it nearly came together. In the end, Devil’s Head felt less like a subject and more like a teacher, reminding me that some encounters are about attention and reverence as much as proximity.

Wind Mountain, Kananaskis, July 2020.
This remains my favourite panorama, hands down. It gathers so many classic peaks into one quiet sweep: Bogart, The Fortress, Mount Joffre, and of course, Wind itself.

Yuri and I were having lunch on nearby Mount Lougheed 3 when two scramblers stepped onto the summit of Wind (Lougheed 4). “Get your camera out, Dad,” Yuri called. I had my longer lens that day, a 100mm, and started building what would become this gigapixel image.

In the end, it came together from 46 individual frames, stitched with the same kind of care and patience NASA uses for their rover images. A small human moment, folded into a vast alpine scale.

Spionkop Ridge, Alberta.

Yuri and I discovered this place through a Bob Spirko YouTube video, and it called to us like a quiet invitation. The curves and colours felt almost deliberate, like a landscape designed to be seen.

We stayed at Bowin Lake and climbed four summits during that trip. The Castle Wilderness feels like a different universe, less “Rockies” and more “dreamscape.” We left with our hearts full and our memory cards overflowing

Mount Athabasca, Jasper National Park.
This composite was captured from the summit of Boundary Peak during Peak Week 2023. On the surface it’s a scale image: small climbers against a massive face, tucked into a quiet corner of the Rockies. But it has become my “why” image.

Why do we climb? Because these mountains keep calling us back. These peaks are not just beautiful, they are quiet cathedrals that demand we show up fully. They open the imagination, soften the ego, and remind us what it means to be alive. And honestly? That’s the best kind of addiction.