Maybe it is the seven cups of coffee I’ve been mainlining all afternoon. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been cooped up too long, but quicker than you can say 'Patience is a virtue', the baby is tossed with the bathwater. Now I am double-timing it back to the cosmic blue Toyota Matrix. Sweating and agitated I start to second guess my second guess.

The truth was I was terrified. I thought there was a better-than-average chance I might starve at the bottom of a crevasse or lose my team in a blizzard. I was also certain I had no idea what I was doing as a photographer. Turns out I was right about at least one of those things.

I’ve found that my approach to seascapes lies somewhere between a harmonious balance with nature and barely making it back to the car in one piece.

Forgetting my hands, the cold, and the height I reach for my camera. Exhausted and battle-worn, hanging from ice screws, I am primed, ready for inspiration to strike. As the snow whips around us, I frame one of my oldest climbing partners and friends against the deep winter backcountry of Western Newfoundland.

By the end of the day, something had to break. My attitude or my luck. I’m tits deep in some unholy bramble of a roadside demon bush, I’ve lost a boot and my tripod refuses to lock in place – as if luck cares which way I peel out of this hot mess. With the sun setting over Abraham Lake I think to myself, “you only have yourself to blame”, and there is true freedom in this realisation.