A little Catch-Up

John has been dying for me to get a blog up about our travels.  As you may have noticed, I've been such a slacker about the blog since I found out about Evangeline..  I guess I just associate blogging now with pouring my heart out and it's kind of exhausting.  So forgive me if I keep things pretty light for a while, I need the break.

Back in August, one of John's buddies from college was getting married.  The wedding was to be held in Whitefish, MT and as we google mapped the town we realized a couple of things. 1.) It was pretty much in the middle of nowhere and 2.)  It was in the middle of nowhere with lots of mountains, valleys, rivers, gorges---  which makes it the perfect spot for a pretty amazing National Park!  Glacier National Park to be precise!  We had heard raves about the place and though we were able to frequent the National Parks in Utah when we lived there, Glacier was always high on our list!  So we RSVP'd a solid YES for just the two of us!  The kids needed some Nani time anyhow and we will always enjoy the "us" time!  We went out for about a week and around all the wedding festivities, we'd take day trips over to the park for hiking, rafting and picture taking.  The first night we got there, we rushed to the park for a 1.5 mile (one way) hike called the Hidden Lake overlook.  We ran into a photographer on the way in and my interest was peaked.  I love portrait and lifestyle photography but this was really a first when it came to getting serious with landscape photography (layman's speak for I have NO IDEA what I'm doing).  While we walked, I fired questions at the photographer in hopes to pick up some tips.  He fed me some info but said that he'd been coming to the same spot all week in hopes of getting "THE" shot but it just hadn't panned out for him yet.  John and I stopped along the trail and I started shooting the locals while the other guy continued on his trek.

While I was at that spot, the sun got lower and lower in the sky so we hunkered down for a bit in hopes of getting some good shots at sunset.  I felt like I was exhausting the panorama that I was working on so we packed up and started heading back...  About 10 minutes into our hike back, I turned around to see the sky doing some amazing things that hadn't been present just 10 minutes ago.  With John's encouragement, we turned and rushed back to the site we had sat before.  This was a lesson on patience for me because I almost missed the most amazing sunset I think I've ever seen because I just wasn't being patient.  Once I set up the tripod and took my series of the same panorama shots as before, I knew that turning around was a brilliant idea.  WOW!  The difference of colors was out of this world!  God blessed us with a perfect picture in which I was trying to capture!

This was the difference the 15 minutes made.  The left was the last shot I took before leaving and the right was the first shot I took after we came back!!  It only got more dramatic after this shot!

So the final panorama image result is this:

Taaaa daaaaa!  We blew this up to a 12x60 inch photo that will be framed and on our wall once we get a custom frame for it!

And that was only the first day in Glacier!

The rest of out trip I will sum up in pictures (because I'm tired of typing).