Larch

Larch was born during a 48-hour backcountry hike in Egypt Lake, Banff, Alberta. Carrying a camera and notebook, I gave myself to the discipline of studying “one thing”: the larch tree. Whether cresting Healy’s Pass or wandering mossy valleys, I kept my gaze fixed on these shifting companions, tracing their forms until they imprinted themselves within me.

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The series pairs thirteen photographs with a single poem, weaving together word and image. Each frame and stanza seeks to hold something of the larch’s essence: the sage-green needles like bristles of a brush, the golden canary tint that signals autumn’s threshold, the quiet resilience of a tree that thrives where others do not. The poem itself unfolds like a hike, each line a step that reveals a new world.

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At times, the work leans into the Zen paradox, mountains as mountains, then not, then mountains again. At others, it is intimate and playful: a hiker offering a berry, a marmot’s scream echoing the valley. Larch is not an attempt to explain the tree but to let its presence seep through word and image, until viewer and hiker alike wonder:

 

Does looking so long make you part of the mountain itself?