| Waterfall in Grotto Canyon Below is a description of the photograph you were looking for, and the circumstances surrounding the photo. Photographer: David Wasserman Technical: Canon Powershot S2 IS, digital, 6-72mm zoom lens at 6mm, 1/80 at f/4, stitched from three photos with Canon Photostitch, resized with Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 Technical: Canon Powershot S2 IS, digital, 6-72mm zoom lens at 6mm, 1/80 at f/4, stitched from three photos with Canon Photostitch, resized with Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 Caption: The falls at the forks in Grotto Canyon are up the narrow canyon that is the right fork. Story: Grotto Canyon is at the foot of Grotto Mountain in the Bow Valley. There is a popular hiking trail up the canyon, and dozens of sport-climbing routes on the canyon walls before the forks. The mountain itself is a popular summit for scramblers, and Rat's Nest Cave is under the mountain. On the Sunday of the June weekend group campout for the Grant MacEwan Mountain Club, four of us decided to go for the relatively short hike up Grotto Canyon before driving back to Edmonton. We parked at the Grotto Pond parking area just off Highway 1A, and headed west along the access trail. None of us had ever been there before, and so we turned right into the first trail up a canyon that we saw. We hiked up a short distance, but the canyon narrowed and the trail petered out. We tried a side trail that led up a ridge overlooking the Bow Valley, but it didn't seem like it was going to take us back into the canyon, so we returned. Back at the canyon bottom we met two people who had just figured out that this wasn't Grotto Canyon, and we were easily convinced that they were correct. Another group we met on the way out said this was Steve Canyon. I thought they were joking until I found that name in a guidebook. At any rate, we continued on to the real Grotto Canyon, and two of us hiked up as far as the forks, where I was unable to convince a young woman to stand under the waterfall to liven up a photo. She pointed out that the water was icy cold. The access to the base of the falls was up steep, smooth, damp rock, but I'll go to some lengths to take a photo. The canyon is so narrow that I needed to stitch together three shots to get the whole waterfall into the picture. To see the actual photo you must be a Paid Member |