Two years ago I spent my first significant time alone in the backcountry. I camped at Garibaldi Lake and spent five days hiking and exploring the area. I instantly fell in love with the place, learned plenty about backcountry camping and about myself too.

Although I hear more about Black Tusk when I mention Garibaldi Lake to others, the highlight of my mid-September trip was the view from Panorama Ridge — the other nearby hike.

Standing atop the ridge back in 2006, I snapped one of my favourite self portraits. It shows me grinning into the camera while my jacket hood is billowed by the wind. I am surrounded by mountains and glaciers all around, and below the shadows of clouds cover the beautiful turquoise blue lake. With the photo taken, I beat a hasty retreat down to escape the cold.

But not before vowing to come back one day.

Fast forward to the Thanksgiving long weekend.

After breaking trail in about eight inches of snow from Black Tusk Lake, following the footprints left by a wolf, I returned to Panorama Ridge.

There was a healthy layer of powdery snow, but no wind, allowing for a cool break up top.

Much had changed. I was older, wiser perhaps, and came better prepared. But I still had my camera, and had to take the obligatory mugshot.

Me on Panorama Ridge September 2006.

Me back on Panorama in October 2008.

No, not quite. But it may be coming close for me as I’m down to my last three rolls of (probably expired) slide film. A fourth is already loaded into my trusty Nikon FM2 with fourteen frames remaining. The other twenty-two were exposed Friday night during an attempted street shoot along Commercial Drive with a few friends. Of course, once beer got involved, things began spiraling into wobbly fuzziness.

It was still fun.

The decision to edge film out isn’t an easy one. Film photography has always been. It evokes memories of long endurance as my photographer father took brief moments to frame the perfect childhood memory, and family dinners where we’d pose again and again so each mother, aunt and grandmother would have her own photo to take to the developers.

Film was also the medium I learned with. It was creativity restricted, and I loved the challenge. But I love digital too, because it offers what film does and more, with limited drawbacks. So once the film is all exposed, the FM2 is going into retirement.

Although I’m looking forward to it, it will also be a sad day.

High tide was coming in at Chin Beach with each advancing wave. That’s when I heard it: a sound from my childhood, the sound of marbles rolling in my palms. With each successive smash of waves against the sand and stones, I heard the warbling clatter.

I’ve never played marbles before, never figuring out the rules or actually knowing anyone who could teach me. But I’ve seen it in cartoons and absorbed it flipping through Dennis the Menace and Peanuts comics. So marbles – the little glass balls with what seemed like colourful icing or toothpaste injected into its centres – were a part of my childhood, and I clearly remember the sound when you rolled the green mesh bag full of them in your hands.

And now, 21 kilometres into the Juan de Fuca Marine Trail, as I crouched on the dry sand by the advancing line of wet, I was hearing it again as each wave receded and the white foam waters drew back tiny stones, rolled smooth by centuries of this dance. It was beautiful.