It looked like it was going to be a good night.
Heading south and west I could see the orange rind of a half moon in front of me while off to the east, lightning glowed in the retreating clouds. A thundershower had just passed through the hills by Millarville and, driving along with the windows rolled down, the air smelled amazing.
I was headed this way because the forecast was calling for smoke to roll in overnight. I had previously figured on heading out to Dry Island Buffalo Jump in the morning but once I saw the smoke signal I figured it would be pointless to go take pictures of that gorgeous river valley obscured in a grey miasma. And besides that, I'd gotten an email alert that there might be northern lights.
A solar outburst was about to reach our planet and bring with it an aurora outbreak so I looked up where the clearest skies would be and found that they were in the mountains to the southwest. Clear skies, moonlight, aurora, smoke-free, yep, by 9 p.m. I was on the road.
But by the time I hit the junction of Cataract Creek and the Highwood River, I thought maybe I hadn't made the right choice.
Not that it didn't look pretty nice. The moon was casting amber light on the moving water and it shimmered as it passed through the dark forest. But there were problems.
For one, the moon was very low in the sky. Out on the prairie that wouldn't have mattered but here in the mountains it meant that the moon was going to be blocked by the peaks. Right here, where it lined up with the waterways, it was okay. But anywhere else, it would be obscured.
The second problem was that the smoke had already arrived. It gave the moonlight a coppery tint but it and the clouds overhead stole a lot of its already very dim light. Not ideal.
But I was this far now so I continued on.
I stopped again near Highwood House to aim my camera up at some limber pines on a ridge. I could see stars in the sky, a couple of them bright enough to focus on, but with the moon hidden, the light on the foreground was nearly nonexistent. But with a long exposure of 30 seconds, the camera saw what I couldn't see.
And what it saw was the clouds receding. Okay, one snag hopefully gone. There was still the smoke but it wasn't too terrible, especially looking up at the sky, but I'd lost the moonlight for good.
The darkness deepened as I headed up the Highwood River valley. The combination of trees and mountains sucked up most of the scant ambient light and patches of new black pavement soaked up the light from the headlights, too. But as I turned the corner by Storm Creek at the base of Highwood Pass, I saw a soft glow in the sky so I pulled over and aimed my camera.
Could it be the promised aurora? My eyes could barely make it out but the camera saw it clearly. There was reddish glow behind the peaks and a greenish glow edging into the sky above.
I clamped the camera to the edge of my driver's side window and hit the thunder button.
The colour was there, the aurora, though not strong, had actually shown up. I aimed the camera at the other peaks around me to see what it would pick up and at the bridge over Storm Creek, I got a surprise.
I thought I'd seen a streak of light as the 30-second exposure was running and when I looked at the picture once the exposure was done -- I love modern cameras! -- I could see that a meteor had blasted by. Nice!
Over Highwood Pass and more pictures trying to catch the aurora. It was midnight now and the darkness was full. The glow of Calgary's lights back off to the northwest was just that, a glow. Beyond that faint shimmer, there was nothing but starlight. By the time I hit the turn to Upper Kananaskis Lake, even the aurora was gone.
But I wasn't alone.
Obviously, others had received the same aurora alert as I had and at Lower Kananaskis Lake I accidentally blinded a group with my headlights as I pulled up to have a look. I apologized, of course, but they seemed uninterested in conversation so I left them huddled together with their tripods and headed for the upper lake.
Where there were more people.
If these folks were waiting for the aurora to return, they were more jovial about it than the original bunch. They had a little fire going down on the shore and I could hear them laughing and joking around. So instead of ruining their evening as I had wth the first group, I decided to just clamp my camera back onto the window and shoot a few pictures.
It was getting on toward 1:30 in the morning when I left the campers to their little shoreline party and rolled back down the valley. With the dark evergreens along the road and the only light coming from my headlights and the stars above, I was unsure what to do next. So when I got to the Smith-Dorrien Trail junction, I had a decision to make.
Do I head home, get a couple of hours of sleep and see what I could find in the smoky countryside the next day or just keep going.
It was an easy decision. Hitting my signal light to alert any owls or voles that I was making a left turn, I rolled on down Smith-Dorrien Trail.
If I thought that it was dark before, I was in for a surprise. Driving along with my headlights on their dimmest setting, I was hoping that my eyes would adjust to the inkiness all around me. And to a certain degree, they did. I could see the stars and even a few clouds among the mountaintops.
But the valleys were mostly just black. Stopping at the Smuts Creek valley by Mt. Engadine Lodge, I could just make out the water flowing along and the grey smudges of snow packs on the peaks but even my camera was struggling. I cranked up the ISO to 12,800, used my fastest f1.8 lens and all I got was a muddy, formless mess.
It was a similar story down at Spray Lake. The sky was lit by the glow from Canmore just over the mountains to the north but down along the lake it was full dark. On top of that, the smoke was now getting heavier. The stars became blobs instead of the pinpoints of light they had been back up at Highwood Pass.
Canmore was just a few minutes further down the road so I kept going down the Spray Valley hoping to find a viewpoint at Goat Pond but it was so dark that I was past it before I realized where I was. Turns out that there might not have been that much water in it anyway.
Crossing the bridge that goes over the canal that channels water over to Whitemans Pond and the flume that carries it down to the dam above Canmore, I noticed that it was nearly dry. A couple of bends later, I saw why.
There was some sort of construction work going on and heavy machinery was running. The work area at the head of the pond was lit with floodlights that spilled onto the mountainsides and lit the layer of smoke that was setting in. Not exactly the serene starlit scene that I had been hoping to find here but at least there was light. Turned out to look pretty cool anyway.
It was getting on to 3:30 a.m. as I rolled through Canmore and onto the 1A highway. Wind was ruffling the water at Gap Lake -- no star refections there -- so I kept on rolling over to Bow Valley Provincial Park. There are a couple of spots there where you can see the flat face of Yamnuska over the trees so I pulled into the first one and aimed my camera.
I couldn't actually see the mountain or much of anything beyond the line of trees but it was so dark that I wasn't surprised. Maybe the long exposure would bring it out.
It didn't. The smoke that had been hazy back in the Spray Valley was now London-esque thick. The camera showed a bruised, brown haze that filled the sky and blocked everything beyond the tree line. My night photography was done.
Go home? No, why bother. It was getting close to 5 a.m. now, might as well stay out to see what the sunrise brings. So I pulled in by the gas bar by the Stoney Nakoda casino, put the seat back and closed my eyes.
The brightening sky woke me up an hour later so I put the truck in gear and headed back to K-Country to watch the morning bloom.
And as I did I realized that I should have just stayed home and gotten up early instead.
Dry Island still wouldn't have worked but here in the blue light of dawn at Barrier Lake, I realized that coming west instead would have, absolutely.
It was cold and windy but gorgeous, the combination of morning mist and smoke making everything a pastel blue. Over by Sibbald Meadows Pond it was even more lovely, the smoke giving the grass and trees a soft glow. Further along in the grassy valley where Sibbald and Jumpingpound Creeks meet, cattle grazed in an amber glow.
And as I photographed them, the sun rose over the mist and hung in the smoke above, an orange ball suspended above the trees.
It continued to glow as I rolled along, lighting up road dust and mist around a little mulie buck and backlighting ponds and treed hillsides. Back out in the more open country it lit the smoke, now blue as the sun rose higher, around a redtail hawk perched on a dead tree and sent coppery ripples spreading out behind paddling ducks. A spiderweb, heavy with dew, caught the amber glow.
Yep, I probably should have just waited and gone out for this instead of driving all night through the mountains. But where would be the adventure in that?
Eyes burning both from the smoke and lack of sleep, I rolled on home.