From my home at sea level in Vancouver, British Columbia I look up at Mount Seymour in the North Shore Mountains. While it rarely snows in the city, the mountain peaks display their snowy summits throughout the winter. A good road zig-zags up Mount Seymour to provide winter access to a trail head used by back-country skiers and snow-shoe hikers.

In this occasion. It had been raining in the city for a week, while snowing in the mountains. Monitoring the weather, I noted that the next morning was forecast to dawn bright and clear. The night before, I prepared for an early snow-shoe start up the mountain. I drove up the mountain well before dawn and arrived at the trail hear 90 minutes before sunrise. Equipped with my camera backpack, tripod and headlamp, I began to make fresh tracks in the deep snow up towards the summit of the mountain. After climbing 45 Minutes, well before sunrise, I no longer need the headlamp as the eastern sky began to brighten. I decided to stop on the ridge below the summit peak to take in the view.

To the west, the full moon was hanging in the the pink pre-dawn sky, above the blue shadow of the earth, projected against the sky by the rising sun, still below the eastern horizon.

I was alone in complete silence, without a breath of wind. I spent another hour there, making photographs of the landscape bathed in the changing morning light. Returning down the mountain , I met others coming up. I felt privileged to have had one of the most sublime visual experiences of and solitude in this wonderful winter landscape.