A Trip Into History.

I\'ve long been a fan of Nicholas Morant\'s work. For those of you who don\'t know who Nick Morant was, he was employed by the CPR as their “Special Photographer”. Over his career he took thousands of photos from all over Canada, not just of trains, but anything else in Canadian Pacific\'s corporate field of endeavour. He also took many photos of subjects not related to the Canadian Pacific group of companies. One of his favourite locations for taking pictures is a s-curve on the CPR main line just east of Lake Louise. He took so many pictures at this site that it became known to railroaders on the CPR as “Morant\'s Curve”. I\'d known about Morant\'s Curve for several years, but didn\'t know about it\'s exact location until this past Christmas when Mrs. Evil gave me two books on Nicholas Morant (Nicholas Morant\'s CPR, and Nicholas Morant\'s Canada; both good books if you\'re into photography). The books detailed where Morant\'s Curve was and to my surprise it was easy to get to. I had assumed that the curve was tucked away deep in the wilderness of the national parks. I was wrong, the curve was just off what used to be the Trans-Canada highway and now is highway 1A.

This makes sense of course, since it would have been easy for Morant to simply drive to the location with his hundreds of pounds of equipment and set it up. This isn\'t to say Morant didn\'t go to remote locations to photograph the CPR, he did (and his equipment went by train), but this tidbit of information led me to go on an adventure to see the curve for myself.

Mrs. Evil and myself headed out to find Morant\'s Curve. It was relatively easy to find, since I had found it on the map (though the map was old and they had moved where highway 1 meets highway 1A). As we drove up from the west I spotted the point where I thought the curve would be (the curve is a view to the west, so driving east it isn\'t as easy to spot as one would think). There was a small parking lot at the spot I though and when we turned around in the lot to face west, there it was.

I found a place to set up my camera, unloaded my equipment and took some pictures. After about a half-hour wait, a train rolled through the scene and I took some more. I think I\'ll be heading out here more often to take some pictures.