Day One: Emerald Lake, Yoho National Park

The first destination for Stephanie and I after arriving in the Canadian Rockies was British Columbia's Yoho National Park. We started our day at Emerald Lake (after our planned stop at Takakkaw Falls was temporarily detoured by a rock slide). As you can see from this photo, photography was difficult our first day (as well as a few subsequent days) because of cloudy skies that obscured many mountain tops. However, for a few moments at least, those clouds added some intrigue to this view, and I captured a few shots before the mountains were fully hidden.

A few notes on Emerald Lake itself- high above the lake, one can find one of the most important fossil beds known to evolutionary biologists, the famous Burgess Shale. The fossils found there by Charles Doolittle Walcott tell the story of the Cambrian Explosion, a period of dramatic diversification of marine body plans. My interest in these fossils dates back to reading Stephen Jay Gould's A Wonderful Life as a college student, a book I'd recommend to all biologists interested in evolution and in good science writing.