Favourite photos of 2020

A nice little stump with some greenery growing out in the middle of the lake. Love the soft blur of the trees on the water. Green on green on green.

It kind of goes without saying that 2020 has been a bit of a dumpster fire of a year. But it hasn’t been all bad for us, at least as a family. With our twins having turned 4 in the Spring of 2020, we’ve spent a lot more time together than we would have otherwise. There certainly have been times where we spent too much time together! We could have never have guessed that both Katie and I would be working from home full-time, and with the kids being pulled out of daycare early on, they were with us all at the same time. It was a pretty crazy first 6 weeks of working 16+ hour days before we broke down and hired a full-time babysitter to help us corral a normal workday.

When I first thought of pulling together my favourite photos from this past year, I was thinking it was going to be a nice collection of some of the more interesting things I shot along the way on our trips, but as I went back through all my favourites, all the pictures of the kids kept rising to the top. As crazy of a year as it was, and after spending so much time together this year, we still got out and did a lot – all outdoors, which is what we would have been doing anyway. We did our best to stay away from where the crowds were going and did more camping trips with just our family, where normally we’d be out camping with different families. In the end, we’ve tried to shelter the kids from what’s going on, and I think as far as they know, everything we did was exactly as it was planned. It’s made us pretty thankful that they have each other to play with, and seem to have adapted to the fact that playgrounds are just things we walk by – which was really hard for them in the early days.

Katie leading the kids down the hill. Our ski season was shut down earlier than anticipated because of COVID-19, but we did get out a lot throughout the year. The kids really took to riding new trails and even started going down the blue runs – not bad considering they hadn’t even turned 4 in these pictures.

We’re a skiing/snowboarding family, so in the winter months, we’re out in the snow as much as we can be. We got out plenty of times this year before the Pandemic shut everything down on us – in fact, we were up at Cypress Mountain on the day early in March when they announced they were closing at the end of the day, for the season.

It looks like a bunch of my favourite photos from this year happened out on the ski hill. I guess that’s because it was a bit of a rollercoaster where our daughter started off not really wanting to ski the first few times out, but our son was really into it. I know we had some pretty heavy snow days, and that made things tough for her, and she sat off to the side and we took turns playing with her at the bottom of the hill. But then something clicked for her. And then it was pretty competitive for her to really excel at it. And that was amazing to watch. I know we got a few looks when we were up at the top of Cypress Mountain because you don’t often see kids that small skiing all on their own (without leashes, etc.), so it was fun to watch them just take off full-speed down the mountain and be passing kids twice their age.

This was a pretty common look for us all summer; the kids in rain gear head-to-toe and sitting by a smokey wet fire under multiple tarps. At least on this weekend, the weather did clear up and we had a great weekend paddling on Chilliwack Lake.

In a lot of ways, not a lot really changed for us either. We did plenty of camping in the Summer of 2020, and that’s something we would have done anyway. All this camping also seemed to happen on the rainiest year of camping we’ve ever had. The first three outings were almost completely in the rain the whole time. One of our trips started off with us setting up our tent in puddles of rain in the dark, where the tent soaked up the water from the bottom and so we started off a 5-day camping trip with a wet tent. We got it dried out inside enough to make it sleep-able, but after four straight days of downpour, the tent started leaking at the top. So our tarp game was pretty strong this year, and we also took the time to do a top-to-bottom rainproofing of the tent.

The kids are now old enough to take pictures of us, so Katie and I may actually appear together in photos again. This was taken on a walk down a backcountry road hike while we were camping.

Paddling up the Widgeon Creek on the hottest day of the summer, and nowhere to hide.

Katie and I have been talking about doing a paddle up the Widgeon Creek forever. I’m pretty sure it was the hottest day of the summer when we decided to finally pull the trigger. It was a great way to spend the day, and we spent lots of time just floating in the river to cool off. We’ll definitely be making this trip again the next chance we get.

Some of the ‘Mountain Time’ crew that showed up on time to be in the photo. That’s me on the far right.

For years I’ve wanted to put on an event that gets a bunch of creatives together for an evening on the ski hill. That finally happened this past February when I put on the inaugural Creative Pulse ‘Mountain Time’ event. We got about 25 creative industry people together for a night at Cypress Mountain. It was a great night out on the mountain; we all met some new people and relaxed in the bar for a little apres-ski. Just as I was planning the much-asked-about follow-up event, COVID came and shut the ski hills down for the season.

Check out the thumbnails below to see some of my other favourite photos I shot this year.