Quest to the West

This eBook celebrates a journey to some of the most beautiful and inspiring landscapes in the world. My wife and I left our home in Ottawa, Canada in the fall of 2012 in our small motorhome to see and to try to capture photographically some of the grandeur of the American southwest. Quest to the West is a visual and poetic record of our first expedition to this area. We drove from Ottawa to Sault Saint Marie in northern Ontario to capture the pristine images of the rivers, lakes and granite rock formations of the Agawa Valley aboard the Algoma Railroad. Our next stop was the long drive across the US Midwest battling gale force winds to reach Badlands National Park in South Dakota where no previous experience prepared us for the vast panorama of sharply eroded buttes and hummocks of tremendous size. The shear breadth of awesome beauty was overwhelming to one city born and bred. From the Bad Lands we travelled to the incredible Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. We arrived late in the season and had only 2 short days to try and capture the lakes, canyons, rivers and its famous geothermal feature, Old Faithful. Further along our route was the magical Bryce National Park in Utah. Higher in elevation and more remote than some other national parks, the stunning views from the rim provided our first real view of a sea of red, orange and white pinnacles that line the valley floor. Our next stop was in Moab, Utah. Here the national parks of Arches and Canyonlands wow the viewer with many incredible natural red sandstone arches and massive wind carvings. Our final stop was the south rim of the Grand Canyon. While the other landscapes were truly incredible, the grandeur of this area, its size, color and dazzling erosional forms make it unique. We hope you enjoy our visual and poetic interpretation of our quest to the west as much as we did and still do.