The name on this photo is Magdelene, the editor of this page and the photograper. That may look odd on this page. It is still my picture. I took it yesterday at Forgetmenot Pond, and I put the text there because I am tired of pretty places being lifted and reposted as if the camera belonged to someone else. The file has been through a few saves, so it is a little softer than the original. The pond does not mind.
Forgetmenot sits at the end of Highway 66, in the Little Elbow day-use area of Kananaskis Country. On a still morning the mountains come down into the water in one piece. Grey rock, a dark band of spruce, then the reflection, clean enough that you can pick out the same peak twice. A spruce frames the left side. Two stones break the surface on the right. The near shore is gravel and dry grass, and that is where I was standing.
It is not a hard walk. The path around the pond is short, partly paved, and busy on a fine weekend. The trick is not distance. It is timing, and not stopping at the first gap in the trees. Go when the lot is thin. Walk past the first picnic table. Stand long enough for the wind to drop. The reflection only holds when the water is left alone, and the water is only left alone when most people are still on the road.
I like these places best then. Not empty, exactly. Just unclaimed for an hour. The peaks across the Elbow Valley do the same thing whether anyone is there to see them. Being there early, and walking the extra few minutes to the open shore, is the whole method. Laziness gets you the parking-lot view. The parking-lot view does not get you this.
Kananaskis rewards that small effort over and over. A side path, a weekday, a camera kept in the bag until the frame is right. Yesterday the pond paid it back in full: blue sky, a doubled mountain, and enough quiet to hear the gravel underfoot.
The caption stays. The morning was mine.
