Astotin Lake at Elk Island National Park  in Alberta (approximately 45 minutes east of Edmonton) on the last night of my annual camping adventure with my parents…

We saw a lot of wildlife while we were in Jasper National Park (I’ll share pics in upcoming posts), but the best sunset of the trip was at Elk Island.  It’s just a pretty lake, and just might be one of my favourite places to photograph at sunset.  Beware, the bugs are bad, though! I got quite a few mosquito bites (and when we camped there for a night in July 2012, the mosquitoes were equally as bad).  I had to edit out little bug specks in all these photos!

Because I can’t resist a good quote or poem, here’s a poem by Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay:

Nature’s first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

And from one of my all-time favourite movies, the Outsiders (of course, originally from the book by S.E. Hinton…the summer I was 11 I’m sure I watched the movie 10 times on HBO…Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio…I was in pre-teen heaven!) this quote:

I’ve been thinking about it, and that poem, that guy that wrote it, he meant you’re gold when you’re a kid, like green. When you’re a kid everything’s new, dawn. It’s just when you get used to everything that it’s day. Like the way you dig sunsets, Pony. That’s gold. Keep that way, it’s a good way to be.