The first time I saw a glacier was in Joffre Lakes Provincial Park, on a camping trip with my dad, I was 5 years old and had never seen anything like it. The ancient blue-hued ice hung as if frozen midfall above the scree and turquoise water. That night we could hear it creak and rumble, the sound echoing through the alpine. Over 20 years later, I returned to that very same glacier and had to climb so much higher to meet it. A new landscape unfolded before me as I gained elevation and stepped out onto the perfectly still snow covered ice. I was struck by the vastness of that place, and the timeless simplicity of it: the bottomless blue of the sky held in perfect balance with the brightness of snow.


This piece is part of a series inspired by that day out on the glacier, by the feeling of timelessness and serenity but also the knowledge of how finite these landscapes truly are. In each piece, I included our skintracks – the switchbacks we carved into the snow – to show our fleeting passage, and how human activity continues to shape environments seemingly so remote.