I’ve enjoyed sleeping in until about 8 o’clock for the past 10 days or so, but with the pending start of our regular workday routine in just a few more days, I seized upon the challenge of photographing the first sunrise of the New Year as a good reason to get out of bed a little earlier today. Lucky for me, sunrise isn’t until 8:44 these days, so even getting up at 7:45 provides plenty of time to get dressed and washed up and out the door in time to reach a convenient (but good) location with plenty of time to get set up.

I confess I was a little concerned about whether we’d see any colour at all this morning. The sky to the east was quite clear and was already quite light when I was setting up my tripod at 8:15.

The first bit of colour I spotted was actually to the west, reflecting off a contrail hanging in the sky above Ha Ling and Mount Rundle. That’s also when I noticed 5 elk grazing about 50 meters away, very nonchalant and pretty much ignoring me, which got me thinking that to them, this is just another day in paradise!

This is my favourite view to the west from this morning; it includes Ha Ling, Mount Rundle, and Cascade Mountain. The rosy clouds hang over Cascade, which is in Banff National Park.

Finally, several puffy clouds blew in to my view to the east, and I managed to get one good photo with some beautiful sunrise colours.

Meanwhile, Mr. GeoK kept watching the Three Sisters, but he eventually concluded that because of the low angle of the sun at this time of year, the sunrise doesn’t even touch the west faces of the peaks, so this is as much colour as we saw over Three Sisters all morning!

Did you manage to see the sunrise this morning? And if you did, did you make a photograph you’d like to share? If so, please leave a comment with your link. There’s a New Year Sunrise 2014 public group on Flickr, if you’re interested in seeing sunrise photos from around the world. (Full sized versions of most of the above photos are also in the Flickr group). Based on the photos posted there so far, it seems like not many places had colourful skies this morning.