They all have a story they say, but in this case it’s true. Moraine Lake has been a bit of a bucket list shot for me and when I knew I was going to Alberta, I immediately thought of this surreal place. The thing is, I already knew that you have to arrive very early in the morning before they close the road which happens when the lot fills up. We wandered up there one day while in Lake Louise but the lot was full. I briefly spoke to the people tending the gates and a man informed me that the magic time was about 4am, three full hours before sunrise.
We talked more about it that afternoon and my wife was actually pretty gung ho to go! We planned to get up at 2am to strike out on our very own epic photography adventure. Total darkness for the whole drive on unfamiliar mountain roads and the possibility of various animals on the road too. We arrived to the road to Moraine Lake at 3:45am, there was a guard posted but he payed no attention to us so we headed down the road…….we were in! Arriving to the parking lot about 30 minutes later, we found it to be maybe half full already. We picked our spot and settled in for a bit of a snooze ahead of sunrise.
Things started to get a bit more active about 6am as people began moving around heading to the washroom and getting ready for their various hiking treks they were doing. As the darkness began to lift, it revealed our surroundings, we hadn’t seen them as we arrived. We were totally surrounded by extremely large peaks. One of the most beautiful sights I’ve seen. There were people with camping stoves or jet-boils making full breakfast complete with hot coffee or tea while getting ready for their day.
We got sorted out and I located the rock pile and began to look for my spot but found that others had beaten me to the top and staked out all the best positions already. I looked around and scoped out a new location that was almost halfway down the pile on the front face. As I was standing there waiting for the light, I decided to go back down to lake level and shoot from there where I wouldn’t have trees in my frame. I found my wife sitting in the rocks almost directly under where I had previously been. I set up and got to shooting as the light began to dance across the peaks in front of us. Success!
It was a wonderful day, an adventure, something that we would normally not take on but this time, it was just what you had to do to get the picture. We left the lake at about 9:30am having captured many shots, shots of a lifetime really for me. We discussed our morning as we drove home to Canmore to have a shower, a bite and just maybe a nap before heading out to wherever we were to be for our evening shoot. By this time, we had been up so long that we really had a day under our belts already and we had a big sense of satisfaction. We won.
