Sunrise cloud movement over St Mary Lake – Glacier National Park, Montana.

I spent a sunset and two sunrises here on Wild Goose Island, and each time, the light was different. A few minutes after I took this shot, the sky colors disappeared as rain clouds blanketed the eastern sky. It would have been perfect to get this sky and the same alpenglow light that I saw a few days earlier. This is a single exposure shot with three GND filters.

We ended up hiking in the rain to a couple waterfalls later that day to finish our trip. There are still some more photos from this trip that I might post later when I find the time, but this is the last good photo that I took during my trip. If you follow my series thus far, I hope you enjoy the photos as much as I enjoyed capturing them. Glacier National Park is very beautiful, and my photos don’t do it justice.

Sunrise over St Mary Lake – Glacier National Park, Montana.

Remember my St Mary Lake’s Rising Run Sunrise post? This Wild Goose Island alpenglow was shot about half an hour after I photographed Rising Sun Sunrise. I wished that I had a better sky to work with this beautiful morning light. This is a blended image from a single RAW exposure.

Although this is not a very original composition, I decided to post this image to setup for my next post showing the exact same view with a different sky.

PS: my new 1TB hardrive died, thus it took a while for me to restore my photos from backups and to get back to posting.

A fiery sunrise over St. Mary Lake’s Rising Sun – Glacier National Park, Montana

Continuing from my last post, I photographed this St. Mary Lake sunrise scene the following morning.

I had six mornings in the park, and each morning, I woke up before dawn (4am California time) to get to my location. Knowing that the weather on the high mountains are always unpredictable, I made a very conservative plan. I targeted three locations for sunrise and allocated two mornings for each site to increase my chances of catching good light on each location.

One of my intended sunrise locations was arguably the most photographed spot in Glacier National Park: Wild Goose Island. Seeing the eastern sky colors when I passed the Rising Sun boat dock, my heart skipped a few beats. When I arrived at Wild Goose Island, nothing, no cloud, nada! I rushed back to Rising Sun to catch what was left of a good sunrise. The sunrise light I saw on Swiftcurrent Lake was beautiful, but this was the most intense morning sky that I saw during my trip.

If I had the chance to shoot this sunrise again, I’d get down to the Rising Sun boat dock and worked from ground level. There weren’t too many choices as far as composition goes from where I was: right on the side of the road looking down a steep cliff. If I didn’t waste precious time running back and forth between the two locations, I would have had enough time to find a different frame.

Hidden Lake and Bearhart Mountain – Logan Pass, Montana

The Blackfoot Indians refer to this part of the Rockies on the continental divide as the “backbone of the world”. I thought it’s a fitting title for this image showing Bearhart Mountain towering above Hidden Lake.

After a morning hike to checkout Grinnell Lake, we went up Logan Pass to see Hidden Lake. The Hidden Lake trail is one of the prettiest walks I’ve done: blooming flowers, running water cascades, imposing mountains… There was even a small ice field for those wanting to get off the trail for a little climb. After spending about an hour up there watching the mountain goats in their natural habitat, we left early. If there were more clouds, I would have stayed until sundown.