Morants Curve is the famous location of a marketing photo taken by Nicholas Morant, the photographer from the Canada Pacific Railway. It’s close to the town of Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada.

Facts

• Distance – Parking is opposite

• Difficulty – Very easy

• Time – Sunset 

• Season – Winter

• Elevation – None

Access

There is no trail for this location. There is a small parking lot on the opposite side of the road from the viewpoint – all you need to do is park your car and cross the road.

Photo location

This photo is taken from the viewpoint, which is a concrete platform beside the road surrounded by railings. It’s easy to set a tripod or to place a Platypod on the flat top of the railings. There are some trees close to the platform so if it’s busy it may be hard to find a good position. The viewpoint is along the Bow Valley Parkway, no more than a 15 minute drive from Lake Louise and the railway line runs between the road and the Bow River.

Map

Outline

This location is accessible to all, with no steps or rough ground between the parking and the platform. The real question that comes in is with regard to passing trains. There is probably a way to find out when a train will come if you search hard enough, but I relied on luck. I came to this location twice within a few days of each other and on my first visit I watched two passing trains, and on the second I saw three within quick succession. When I arrived that second time there was a chap who had been there for a couple of hours with no passing trains. In terms of facilities, there are restrooms, along with a shop and a café in the nearby town of Lake Louise.

Detail

This line provides freight and traverses the Rocky Mountains, so trains are very large as you can see if you stop off in Jasper to the north and check out the old steam train of the same gauge in town beside the railway station. Because of their enormous size the trains tend to have several engines which, combined with their weight, makes a lot of noise. You can hear the rumble of approaching trains as a clue that they’re coming. There’s a single track but trains pass this location in both directions, so the view towards the mountains nearby could show the back of a train just as much as it could show the front. The main point to take when planning a shoot at Morant’s Curve is that there’s no simple way to determine when a train will pass, so it’s a matter of being in the right place (with the right light) at the right time.

How it feels

Morant’s Curve is an awesome photo location at any time of year, with the stunning peaks of the Canadian Rockies in the background. The photo of the twisting S-bend of the train tracks is taken facing West and those peaks sit with Lake Louise to the right and Moraine Lake to the left. It’s a stunning view with peaks including Sheol Mountain, Devils Thumb, Popes Peak, Mt Aberdeen, The Mitre, and plenty of others in the scene, and it’s obvious why this location was chosen by Nicholas Morant, the photographer for the Canada Pacific Railway company, to shoot a photo of the newly built Trans-Rocky railway line. He worked for the company between 1929 and 1935, then again from 1944 until 1981. His images were also used for Canadian postage stamps and currency, as well as in Time, National Geographic, Life, Reader’s Digest, and others. The feeling here, as a photographer, is one of nostalgia, particularly so because this place is named after a photographer.

What to bring

With a lack of any hiking, this location doesn’t require any supplies, however it’s important to remember that in winter it can be very cold and windy. Because of the time that may be spent waiting for a train to come you could get very cold, very quickly, so wrap up warm. Be careful throughout this entire area because of rough terrain and predatory animals such as grizzly bears, black bears and wolves. Oh, and bigfoot.

Gear

I shot this photo with my Nikon D810 and Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 lens, mounted on a Platypod Max with a 3LeggedThing Airhed.

Settings

This shot was taken at 34mm with a shutter speed of 1/250th, aperture of f/8, and ISO 100.  

Accommodation

AirBNB, Booking.com, and Hotels.com provide the most affordable options across Canada, and there are towns nearby, as well as Banff National Park and Jasper National Park.

The information in this post is geared around how I got the featured shot, and as such the information may or may not be true to other seasons.