Six short days from now, I’ll be starting my canoe trip from Missinaibi Lake to James Bay. In honor of the trip, I thought it would be appropriate to give an excerpt from my favourite wilderness author, Sigurd F. Olson. Listen to the beauty of his prose as he talks about sunsets:

Sunsets had always brought me joy and I had marveled at those almost level rays before the sun dropped below the horizon, but with him [photographer Frank Ross] I became so completely conscious of their wonder that never again did I accept them with complaisance. I discovered later that even more than the beauty of the sunset itself, or its miraculous color effects, was a certain indefinable impact on the mind that brought a scene within the realm of unreality and gave it a patina it did not have before. In its glow came deeper meaning and dimension and, at the moment, all that was bathed in it was illuminated and exalted until the vision before me became one of fantasy and delight. (Runes of the North)