The colour in the ice piled along the shores of Keho Lake was crazy.

Deep blues, turquoises, slivers of silver that sparkled with prismatic rainbows as the shards clattered and tinkled on the banks. I was there with my old friend Stu and we could have spent the entire day taking pictures there. But my impatience made us move on.

I know I’d be back, though, and soon. It was too lovely to waste.

And I did go back, just a few days later, with my friend Bayar. He had been presenting a show of his photographs of his native Mongolia at the Mongolian embassy in Ottawa and now he’d stopped in Calgary to visit his family. Bayar and I have explored Mongolia and southern Siberia together a couple of times and I wanted to return a bit of his hospitality by showing him some parts of Alberta he may not otherwise get to see.

So we headed for the ice at Keho Lake.

An irrigation expansion of a natural lake, Keho sits on the plateau between Nobleford and Barons, just before the land slopes away to the Oldman River valley at Lethbridge. It’s one of the first big bodies of water to start to shed its ice in the spring and therefore one of the first places to find the tundra swans and ducks that are migrating north.

It’s a breezy place at the best of times so when the ice starts to break up on the lake, the slabs get pushed toward the northern shores by the wind. They pile up there and spill out onto the banks where the sun makes short work of them. Stu and I hit it just right. Bayar and I caught it as the colour was waning.

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