Banff – A Journey Through Light and Shadow

Departure – From Golden to Banff

At 2 AM, I boarded the Rider Express bus in Golden. The world outside was a vast expanse of darkness, broken only by the occasional glimmer of headlights tracing the curves of the road. Somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, the landscape blurred into an unseen presence.

By 6 AM, Banff emerged in the pale morning light, still wrapped in the hush of dawn.

Accommodation in Banff is expensive and often scarce. If one cannot find a place to stay, Canmore or even Calgary offers alternatives, with FlixBus and On It providing an easy commute.

At the Elk Street Transit Hub, I fed $25 into a vending machine and received a Roam Transit day pass—a key to the town, granting me boundless movement for the day. My belongings were left at a luggage storage service. With my hands freed and camera slung over my shoulder, I stepped onto the first bus, my journey truly beginning.

Bow Falls – The Breath of Water

Taking Route 4, I arrived at Bow Falls. The water thundered down in a ceaseless, churning descent, a deep murmur reverberating through the valley. Mist curled into the air, dissolving into the crisp morning sky.

I set up my large-format wooden camera, adjusting its weight with practiced hands. Through the ground glass, the falls inverted themselves—an image of rushing water suspended upside-down in a delicate, ghostly composition.

To press the shutter is to freeze a moment that refuses to be still. Even as the camera captures the scene, the water continues to surge forward, indifferent. Does a photograph preserve reality, or does it fabricate a past that never truly existed?

Lake Minnewanka – A Play of Light

As midday approached, I took Route 6 toward Lake Minnewanka. The light had risen high, casting a pristine glow across the lake’s surface.

In the reflection of the water, Cascade Mountain and Mount Inglismaldie lay mirrored, a perfect duplication of the world above. But with a breath of wind, the reflection shuddered, fracturing the symmetry, rippling into abstraction. Memory is much the same—distorted by time, reconstructed by perception.

I raised my camera once more, framing the lake and mountains, attempting to hold onto something inherently ungraspable. In that act, I wondered: do we take photographs to remember, or do we take them to create a memory that suits us?

Banff Red Chair at Two Jack Lake – An Afternoon of Silence

On the return journey, I stepped off the bus at Two Jack Lake, where two scarlet chairs sat facing the water, watching Mount Rundle with quiet patience. It was as if they had been waiting for someone to take a seat, to partake in the stillness.

The afternoon light softened, stretching long golden fingers across the water. Time, here, seemed to slow.

I did not immediately reach for my camera. Instead, I let the landscape settle in my mind, as though imprinting it onto memory before reducing it to an image. Perhaps photography, at its core, is a refusal to let go.

Hoodoos Viewpoint – The Carvings of Time

For my final stop, I took Route 2 to Hoodoos Viewpoint, where limestone spires, shaped by centuries of wind and rain, stood in solemn silence.

Below, the Bow River wound its way through the valley, a silver thread stitching the landscape together. Across the distance, Mount Rundle loomed, its shadow lengthening with the descending sun.

I peered through the viewfinder, adjusting the focus, aligning the elements within the frame. With one press of the shutter, a single instant is claimed—but in the very act of capturing it, the moment is already lost.

Reflections – The Nature of Photography

As night fell and I returned to Banff, I reviewed the images I had taken. The force of Bow Falls, the serenity of Lake Minnewanka, the solitude of Two Jack Lake, the slow erosion of Hoodoos—they were all there. Or so it seemed.

But were they really?

Photography is an act of defiance against time. We capture fleeting moments, believing we have held onto them, when in reality, we have only created an illusion of permanence.

Travel is much the same. We move through landscapes, collecting impressions, hoping to etch them into memory. But what we remember is never quite the same as what we saw.

Perhaps that is the paradox of both journeys and photographs—they do not preserve reality; they merely shape the way we choose to recall it. And in that gap between image and truth, between movement and stillness, something of the place remains.

Something that cannot be captured, only experienced.