Morning Calm on Emerald Bay

I got up at 4am to try to catch the sunrise at Emerald Bay. It would require a little hiking, which normally when I do something like this, I will scope out the location and the route in the daylight. For I don't want to go for a hike in the dark, not really knowing when I am getting myself into. But on this occasion, I assumed it would be easy because it was in a popular area and decided to just go for it. 

I got there right as the sun was starting to rise, and I could already see that it was going to be a good one. I had a 1.5 mile hike ahead of me, so I felt like I had to hurry or I may miss my window of opportunity. Part of the hike was downhill, which I tried to run, and part of it was uphill and climbing on rocks, which I tried to do as fast as I could. What I did not account for, is that it is easy to get to the bottom, but to complete the task of taking the photo facing the sunrise, I had to climb up snow and ice covered rocks along a steep canyon. Once I started climbing on the icy rocks, there were numerous moments where I felt like, “if I’m not careful here, I’m going to slip and fall down the canyon, and possibly to my death.” It took a little bit of climbing around to finally find the spot I was looking for, and once I did, it was in one of the steepest parts and there was so much ice covering the rocks, I didn’t feel like I could get there without falling to my death. So I had to just turn around. One of the best sunrises I have ever seen and I had to leave with nothing to show for it. Needless to say, I was pretty bummed.

I climbed down and came to a picnic bench facing the bay and just sat there for a while. As I was sitting there, sulking in my missed opportunity, I saw these two ducks swim up to the shore. I was surprised to see ducks in such freezing cold water at such a high altitude. I thought maybe they would be down in the foothills or would have flown south for the winter or something. With my fascination with these ducks, I snapped a few of these photos. The calm, glassy waters, the pair of ducks, the mountains in the background, it was surreal.

It felt like fate. There will be plenty more opportunities to shoot the sunrise (which I discovered later a much easier way to get there), but how many more opportunities will I get to take a photo like this one? Sometimes "the plan" is just what gets us out there, but what we are actually out there to do is something completely different.