By @JustinWetch

The hike was supposed to take four hours. It took twelve. Cath Simard was on a solo trip to the Canadian Rockies in 2016, doing her first scramble with five strangers from a Facebook hiking group, and only one of them actually knew what he was doing. Somewhere along the way, the original objective got abandoned for something better: a glacier lake visible far in the distance, on the other end of a long ridge.

They got there. The view was a glacier transforming into a glacier lake into a massive waterfall into another lake, all of it stacked in a single line of sight. Cath took a photo. Something ignited that she didn't have words for.

When the twelve hours were over, she called her mom and cried into the phone.

"I think I need to move here," she said. "I just experienced the most insane adventure of my entire life."

It would take her five more years to actually make the move. The artist she would become was born on that ridge.

Cath was a creative kid pushed toward respectability. Private school in Quebec City, the standard rotation of doctor and lawyer aspirations. She studied biomedical sciences at university with the goal of becoming a doctor, until she realized she was studying for someone else's life.

The detour started at fifteen, when a modeling agency scouted her. She started working in front of cameras and paying attention to the photographers and stylists working around her. She dropped sciences and pursued fashion styling, and within a couple of years she was working at an agency in Montreal, taking on her own clients. Her aesthetic was already there in embryo: surreal, futuristic, cold blue, minimal. The same vocabulary her landscapes would speak in a decade later.

But fashion was hard to live on, and modeling was harder. The industry standards, the body dysmorphia, the slow erosion of confidence. She hit rock bottom in her early twenties, mentally not okay, unable to make a living from her passion, lost. She met someone, they talked about traveling, and within a month or two she had broken her lease, sold most of her designer clothes to pay for the ticket, and bought a one-way fare to Australia.

She went as far away from fashion as she could go and ended up driving a cherry picker on a banana farm in tropical Queensland. Her job was to wrap plastic bags around the banana bunches and spray pesticides inside. She got a rash from the chemicals, so they moved her into the shed, where she pulled the bags off when the fruit came in and learned to expect spiders, frogs, and snakes crawling out of the leaves. When a snake came out, she'd grab it and put it in a bucket.

She loved it.

"I came from this world where what you look like is everything," Cath says. "And then I started doing this where you're dirty every day, you don't care what you look like, you're not being judged on your physical appearance every day. This was the perfect disconnection from what I had been doing before, to reconnect with the true essence of myself."

On weekends she started taking photos. Little hikes, an iPhone 3, a borrowed camera she shared with her partner. An Australian bandana brand saw her Instagram and hired her, sort of, by sending free products in exchange for photos of strangers wearing them. She'd find people on her hikes and ask if they wanted a free bandana. That's how she learned photography, by accident, building an outdoor portfolio while wiping the fashion work off her feed.

When her visa ran out two years later, she took a solo trip through Indonesia and Hawaii, where she shot mostly unusable images, and then landed in the Canadian Rockies. Three weeks renting a car, sleeping in the passenger seat, finding strangers on Facebook to hike with. Then the scramble.

"My work is halfway between reality and imagination," Cath says. It's the line she returns to, the closest she's come to a manifesto. Sometimes the work sits closer to reality, sometimes closer to imagination, but it's always landscape, and it's almost never a single shot.

She started compositing early, before she even knew it wasn't standard practice. The first trigger was frustration with what a camera could capture in one exposure, especially at night. She'd shoot a foreground at blue hour, then the night sky separately, then merge them, building images out of pieces because no single frame could hold what she'd actually experienced. When she started sharing online, she realized not everyone did this.

The philosophy followed the technique. Her aim isn't to represent what was in front of her at one moment, it's to express how a whole experience felt. So she'll do a seven-day trek in Peru and capture different elements along the way: a sky on day one, a foreground plant on day two, a background on day five, another piece on day six. The final image is the sum of all seven days, a painting assembled from puzzle pieces of reality. It's almost impossible for someone standing next to her to make the same picture, because her mind doesn't think in single moments.

Her editing process is brutal in a way most viewers never see. No automatic masking tools, ever. She does everything by hand, layer mask by layer mask, pixel by pixel, sometimes 40 to 50 hours of masking per piece. Color matching gets done gradually over days because the eye gets used to contrast and you have to walk away to see it fresh. Some images take weeks. Some have taken her six months. After a shoot, she leaves the source files untouched on a hard drive for at least two weeks before she starts editing, because she needs to disconnect from the experience to come back to it with new eyes.

She knows when a piece is done the way you know you're full after eating. It's not a thought, it's a feeling.

"Single shot landscape photography for me is more about capturing an experience that was real," Cath says. "Composite photography is more about including parts of myself in the process so I can become part of the landscape."

Sony came calling after she'd been doing photography for two years. She became an ambassador, traveled to Iceland with Chris Burkard and the rest of the team, started leading solo workshops in the Rockies and Patagonia and Iceland. Then COVID killed the workshops, and she spent six months living in her car in the Rockies, hiking and creating with no one watching. She calls it some of her best work, total freedom, just the mountains and the camera.

On-chain art arrived in 2021, and she was one of the first photographers to mint. The recognition felt different from Instagram recognition. People wanted to understand the process and the expeditions, not just double-tap a pretty image. She was being treated as a fine artist for the first time.

Then there was the Hawaii road photo. She'd taken it in 2017, watched it go viral, watched it get stolen by travel websites and reposted across thousands of accounts without permission. When she came to on-chain art, she designed an experiment around it. She would mint the image and release the rights at the same time, with the framing that there can only be one true original, the on-chain piece, and that everything else in the world was just a copy. The more viral the image became, the more valuable the original would get, the same way Picasso reproductions don't lower the value of a Picasso. @Gmoney committed to bidding on the project. It sold for a significant amount. Several other artists and collections followed her lead with CCO releases in the months after.

Cath has shifted her recent focus to physical prints after six years of working almost exclusively in digital. She's also deliberately expanding her mountaineering and ice climbing skills, not only for fitness, but because the work depends on accessing places few photographers reach.

Supporters who've mattered: @NorCalGuy, @MeLlamoMatt, and @Deeze, three early on-chain collectors who never stopped showing up. "The way they would interact with me was really genuine and curious and positive," she says. "I'll never forget that."

Artists inspiring her lately: Joelle Beauchamp, a close friend whose practice keeps evolving from food photography to landscapes to AI to chemical reactions on physical surfaces. Max Rive, whose eye for composition and color shaped landscape photography for an entire generation and who keeps finding new places. And Benjamin Everett, a fine art composite photographer whose blending work she calls imperceptible.

What Cath wishes more people understood is that one shot is never one second, one shot is only a small fragment of the process.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, Cath recommends @joelle_lb, @justinrobiewood, and @jubbishjay.