Lake Louise

Lake Louise is in the Canadian Rockies and a beautiful place. It is a natural lake formed by the glaciers above it and there is a beautiful hotel located just behind where I took this picture. We'll be back for sure....

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Seagulls

I guess I had never thought about seagulls so far from the sea. But there are a lot of them here on the Bow River in Alberta.

There is a definite family resemblence between this fellow and the Aussie gull I put on my Christmas card a while back.

Black Grey Squirrel

According to my extensive research on Wikipedia, black squirrels are a melanistic subgroup of the eastern grey squirrel. I have seen a few of them before but never as many as I've seen in Calgary. That is all I've seen here.

Wikipedia says that before European colonization they may have outnumbered the grey variety. They are still locally common, especially in the North where the coat may be beneficial in colder climates by absorbing heat.

Sorry for the crummy picture. they won't let me near them and they are quick. The urban squirrels in Texas are a lot less wary.

World's Biggest Dropped Rock

The name of this rock is Okotoks, derived from the Blackfoot name for rock okatok.

It is sitting here on the edge of the Alberta prarie after origininating in a landslide that fell on a glacier somewhere between 10,000 to 18,000 years ago (I am not sure exactly when :-). The glacier flowed out of the Canadian Rockies at Jasper, turned South, flowed past Calgary, and when it got warm again dropped the rock here.

Rocks deposited this way are called glacial erratics. This one happens to be the biggest one in the world at 16,500 tonnes with dimensions of 41 x 18 x 9 meters.

View from the Terrace Pt. 4

Here is another sunset view from the terrace.

Calgary's Finest

The Calgary Police were in the air protecting the city in the Eau Claire area down by the river. There is a helicopter pad where they landed for a moment and the photo shows them taking off.

The Calgary Fire Department patrol the Bow River in a jet boat making sure nobody gets in too much trouble there. We don't have a Navy, although we do have the Naval Museum of Alberta (question: why is there a Naval Museum in Alberta?).

Rafting on the Bow River

Today was a day for rafting on the Bow River. There are almost as many people floating the river here as on the Elk. We also had the Bow Flow which was a mini festival along the North bank in this photo and a Bike Fest just below the apartment.

Cricket

and today was a day for playing cricket in Calgary.

A Midsummer's Night Dream

The Shakespearean plays on Prince's Island are free as I've said before and they are also "dog friendly." This means you can bring your dog with you to sit and watch the play. Or your kid.

Here the actor's are "going to sleep" in A Midsummer's Night Dream. Besides staging it in a kind of modern manner, they sometimes stick a bit of modern music in the plays as well. Just before they went to sleep, one of the characters lip synchs a bit of Madonna from Like a Prayer:

Like a child you whisper softly to me
You're in control just like a child
Now I'm dancing It's like a dream, no end and no beginning
You're here with me, it's like a dream
Let the choir sing

Pretty clever if you know the story...

Empty Stage

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

William Shakespeare
As You Like It Act 2, scene 7, 139-143

The Bow River runs through Calgary

Today was a beautiful day in Calgary.

Joe's Mobile Bicycle Garage

Joe is a bicycle mechanic who has a mobile garage. Every day he peddles in from Kensington and pops up his awning in the park along the Bow River in the Eau Claire district of Calgary where we live. It looks like it would be a pleasant place to work in the summer...

Shakespeare in the Park

There has been a free Shakespearean play every evening this week in the park across from the apartment and this is the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.

View from the Terrace Pt. 3

Yet another view from the terrace. Actually we have two terraces and this is the one by the bedroom and things are visable a bit further around to the west there. Click on the photograph to enlarge it to see the tower with a ramp on the horizon about a 1/3 the way from the left border. That is the 90 m ski jump tower at the Olympic Park used in the 1988 Winter Olympics. The park is also the location where the Jamacian bobsled team competed and the film "Cool Runnings" is based on their story.

View from the Terrace Pt. 2

I watched the sun go down again today from the terrace here in Calgary. This view shows the Bow River with the Canadian Rockies visible on the horizon on the left side of the frame. I'm having trouble capturing the colors and not blowing out street lights and stuff but will keep trying...

View from the Terrace Pt. 1

A view towards the city of Calgary from the terrace just after sunset.

Calgary Street Performers 2

I like this photograph. I almost put it in my Photograph a Week Blog because I thought it was probably the best picture I got this week.

The subject is an accordian player in Eau Claire who was playing in the mall. I like the way he sounds and I think the photograph captures how expressive he is when he plays. I've seen him around a bit - good street musician - and I've seen a bunch of them. (Yes Megan, we gave him a donation).

I shot it with my new Nikkor 24-70 f2.8 (gift to myself which I richly deserved) wide open to blur the background. It didn't blur quite as much as I wanted so I cheated and blurred it some more in Photoshop.

Land of the Dinosaurs

This might look a bit cheesy but that is only because it is. The town of Drumheller, population 7,000+, north and east of Calgary is now mostly a tourist destination with a couple of claims to fame: dinosaurs, the "badlands", and a history of mining.

The dinosaur connection is from extensive fossil remains found in the area. It was once a shallow sea with semi-tropical climate. Not today. Anyway, there is is a museum and the town is full of fake dinosaurs, including this one, the "largest dinosaur in the world". We didn't make it to the museum, have to do that later.

To give you a taste of the area I've also posted a slideshow. Just click on it. You can see all my slideshows in the list at bottom left.

Brothers

from a statue depicting brothers
by the sculptor galts
in calgary

it reminds me of picasso
i didn't like the background behind it
so i superimposed it on a photo of some coarse bricks

Calgary Street Performers

So far I haven't been too impressed with the street performers in Calgary but this guy (Angel of Prosperity) was worth a picture. He is supposedly collecting money for the arts rather than his own pocket. There was one guy with a violin that I was ready to offer money for him to stop. Prince Island has some arranged concerts and theatre that promise to be good. For example, they had Shakespeare in the park this last weekend and that was free.

All I need now is Black Socks

This is how I've been wasting time this week.

I bid on this camera on Ebay and I won it! For only $6.01 this beauty from the early '60s is mine. It came with a real leather case and uses real 35mm film. It can be reloaded over and over again and doesn't need any batteries!

The Agfa Optima Ia is the ultimate in retro cool. People knew you were somebody when they saw you with a camera like this in 1962 instead of a Kodak Brownie. The height in family vacation style was a German camera, bermuda shorts, white T-shirt, and black socks at the beach. Ah... the good life.

A shot from a roll I shot this week is featured on my One Photo a Week blog.

Agfa Optima 1a

For those who want a closer look at the camera itself, here you go....

Waiting for the Train

One of the things I like about Calgary, and was nice about Brisbane too, is the public transport. It isn't quite London, but there is a train system called the C-Line and the bus system seems good. The C-Line has a stop about 3 blocks from our apartment. The portion in the downtown section including where we live is free!

Of course nothing is that far a walk in the downtown area. Another nice thing about downtown is the +15. The +15 is a enclosed walkway system that goes through buildings and crosses the streets at roughly 15 feet above the road surface. I'm about 3 blocks from that too so I don't have to walk too far outside when it is cold or wet when on my way to the office. The office is about 20 minutes if I take the +15 and 15 minutes if I walk along the sidewalk.

The picture is a young woman waiting for the C-Line downtown. It is part of a series of 4 that I took for my One Photo a Week blog that you might find interesting. Just after this shot the train stopped and she got on and left the station.

More on Ashcroft

StuMonkey asks how 2500 people could have lived in the View Hotel. In fact, there were many other fine buildings, not to mention the Blue Mirror Saloon which made this a very nice place to live.

Maroon Bells

The peaks in the background are the Maroon Bells near Aspen, Colorado. Colorado is glorious in the summer....

Ghost Town

Here is the View Hotel in the ghost town of Ashcroft near Aspen, Colorado. Founded in 1880 Ashcroft peaked at 2500 persons but had declined to only 100 in 1885 due to poor ore quality in the surrounding silver mines. Local mining took another blow in 1893 with the silver market crash. Postal delivery stopped in 1912 when the population was down to 50. The last resident was said to have died in the '30s of malnutrition.

Yellow-bellied Marmot

I also captured shots of deer, chipmunks, and birds. This handsome critter was on Pike's Peak.

Garden of the Gods

This shot is from the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs.

Becky's Koi Pond

A study in green, just like Becky. I don't mean the color green, but she likes the outdoors and care of the environment...