I just got back from a family trip to Banff National Park, and I swear my brain could not fully process what I was looking at.
The mountains didn’t even seem real.
And I know that sounds dramatic, but honestly, every single time I looked out the window, it felt like somebody had dropped us into an AI-generated background. Like one of those fake “perfect scenery” videos online where you immediately go, “Okay, but there’s no way that’s real.”
Except it was.
That was the weird part.
The entire drive, I kept taking pictures. Constantly. Every corner, every mountain peak, every ridiculous turquoise lake. And every single time I’d look at the photo afterward and think, “Well… that captured absolutely none of it.”
Pictures flatten everything. The scale disappears. The feeling disappears. The way the mountains slowly grow bigger as you drive closer to them disappears.
In real life, they almost don’t make sense. Your brain struggles to understand how something can actually be that huge.
And apparently, I’m not the only person who feels this way.
There are entire online discussions now where people question whether mountain photos are AI-generated because scenery can look “too perfect” to be real. Researchers have even studied how our brains process mountains and landscapes, explaining that lighting, depth, and scale can create visual experiences that almost feel unreal or illusion-like to us.
Honestly, that makes me feel better because there were moments where I genuinely felt like my brain was buffering.
Especially watching my Saskatchewan-born kids stare out the window like, “WAIT… those are actual mountains?”
At one point, my five-year-old just quietly whispered, “Whoa.”
And honestly? Same.
The pictures are beautiful. They really are.
But they still don’t come close to standing there in person, feeling tiny beside something that looks too incredible to actually exist.
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