Happy New Year!  I wanted to start 2016 off with one of the best things to happen to me in 2015.  

The two people at the start of this post are my parents.  Any love for the outdoors and the natural world that I have can be directly related to these two.  Since birth, there were countless camping and exploring trips taken and countless more dreamed of and talked of.  They instilled this insatiable appetite for adventure and a seemingly unquenchable curiosity in me and I cannot thank them enough.  

Unfortunately, due to health reasons and then moving away from my hometown to start my career, the frequency of these family trips slowed and then ceased.

We were presented with an opportunity after a cousin’s wedding out in Edmonton last summer to loosely plan a trip.  This blog post series follows that 7 day trip and the adventures we had exploring over 2100km of roads, paths, and trails through Banff, Kootenay, and Yoho National Parks.  It harkens back to the trips we’d take when I was younger and what sparked it all.

This first blog post is focused on my parents and is a bit of a teaser as I work on the images I shot for my book. These are some of my favourite moments of my parents and our trusty rental car while we explored through random mountain roads and hikes.

I’m very proud of my parents for pushing hard on the hikes we did.  I’m also incredibly thankful for the patience they had with me as I stopped every 100 meters to get out and take a photo.