Montmorency Falls: 83 Metres Tall, 20 Minutes From the Château Frontenac, and Seen by a Fraction of the People Who Visit Niagara

Montmorency Falls is eighty-three metres tall, which makes it thirty metres taller than Niagara. It is located nine kilometres from the Château Frontenac, twenty minutes by car from the Old City, and it is visited by about 10 percent of the people who visit Niagara. The waterfall drops from the plateau above the St. Lawrence River into the gorge below and the spray from the base carries several hundred metres in the wind, which means the photography conditions at the base involve constant mist on the lens and require specific handling. I have photographed at Montmorency Falls enough times to know exactly where to position for a ceremony that includes the full drop in frame without the mist making every lens clean a session interruption.

The Falls and the Bridge

The park around Montmorency Falls (Parc de la Chute-Montmorency) has a cable car, a suspension bridge across the top of the falls, a staircase descending the cliff to the base, and viewing platforms at multiple levels. The suspension bridge at the top, sixty-six metres above the gorge, gives a view across the falls from the east with the full drop visible and the St. Lawrence River visible in the distance beyond. In summer the bridge has significant visitor traffic. In shoulder season October and in winter it has very few people. I use the bridge for formal portrait shots when conditions permit: the wind on the bridge can be significant and the couple needs to be dressed for it.

The base of the falls, accessible by staircase from the parking area, gives the full scale of the eighty-three-metre drop in a single frame. The mist at the base creates a diffuse light condition similar to Shannon Falls on the Sea to Sky: the direct sun is blocked and the spray adds a soft foreground element to wide-angle portraits. In winter the spray freezes on the cliff face and the gorge accumulates a natural ice cone at the base that grows through January and February, visible from the viewing platform across the gorge, and which adds a visual element in cold seasons that summer visitors never see.

The Ice Cone in Winter

The winter cone at Montmorency is one of the more unusual natural formations I photograph in Quebec. The spray from the base of the falls freezes against the cliff and accumulates through November and December into a cone of ice that can reach thirty metres high by February. The cone is a regional attraction: Quebecers climb it in late winter when it has solidified sufficiently. The ceremony site at the base viewing platform with the ice cone in the background gives a visual that is specific to this site and this season and physically impossible to produce anywhere else. It requires cold gear and timing: the cone is at its most complete from late January through March and melts rapidly in April.

Combining With the Old City

A Quebec City elopement day that combines the Old City with Montmorency Falls is a full day: Petit Champlain at 6am, breakfast in the Old City, drive to Montmorency at 9am before the park fills, ceremony at the falls at 10am, lunch near the park, and the afternoon free. This structure gives two genuinely different visual environments in a single day: the 17th-century cobblestone street and the 83-metre waterfall are twenty minutes apart and visually as different as any two locations within the same city in Canada. The combined gallery looks like a week in Quebec rather than a single morning, and the day is finished before noon.