Alberta

Alberta's a rather weird place. A bit of it is gorgeous unspoiled mountain scenery, the rest of it is a ghastly flat beige wilderness dotted here and there with sprawling nightmarish suburbs and apocalyptic oilsand extraction operations. I guess you could say I'm not a fan.

Anyway, leaving aside stories of unpleasant encounters with native Albertans for another day, this photo was taken a couple of hours out of Calgary on the first day of our honeymoon. We spent three weeks driving slowly through the Rockies to Vancouver Island. The further west we got, the more interesting and attractive it became. My first impression of the Rockies was how oddly sterile and artificial it all looked. This photo, for example - it looks, well, kind of fake. But I haven't touched it (well, hardly). After a few hours driving through this landscape, with raw, untouched nature at every angle, I realised what was missing: a sense of scale. When you drive through the Alps, there's always something against which to measure yourself. Chalets, haystacks, skilifts, roads, villages... But in the big National Parks of the Rockies there is nothing, really, just the road we were driving on and the railway and power lines running parallel to us. Looking through the windscreen we might just as well have been watching a documentary on the telly.

Details: Minolta X-500, 50mm, exposure not recorded. Icefields Parkway, Alberta, 22 July 1996. Placemark (approximate).