It was a beautiful day today, (Wednesday 23rd), windless and comfortably crisp at -3°C, with often clear blue skies and endless sunshine. As such, we abandoned all other plans we had for the day and headed out in the car to Bragg Creek, which lies to the west of Calgary, half way to the Rockies. Lots of Alpine woodland, log houses, snow on the trees and so on. It's a nice ride there, circling around outside the south western quadrant of Calgary on the 22X, which is the nearest equivalent that Calgary has to the M25 around London...a couple of lanes each way, turning to single lane each way, mountain views, hills and troughs, tree-lined verges, horses, cows and assorted wildlife in view along the way...as we say, just like the M25!
As we left Okotoks, we stopped by the church that we featured in a recent blog entry and took what is now becomming a favourite shot of the mountains to the west. We couldn't resist doing so today because the view was so clear (in Summer, there is often something of a haze that degrades the mountain view - also the lack of snow makes them less distinct).
We then carried on to Bragg Creek, where, as you can tell, they let anyone drive nowadays!
As we drove into the Bragg Creek Provincial Park, we stopped by the near frozen river to take in the scene.
As we drove on, we wondered if we had somehow transcended into a children's story...
We stopped again in the Provincial Park car-park where there was just one other car. The only sound was the snow crunching beneath our feet.
We couldn't move for traffic on the roads!
One of the tributaries to the river had a frozen shell beneath which the water was still running in places.
On the way home, we stopped at Spruce Meadows, the Horse Jumping site that we have mentioned in a previous post, as we wanted to capture a shot of their own, equine focussed "Stop" sign at one of the road intersections within their grounds...
As the sun began to set, we took a further slight detour on the way home as we knew of a place we could get a decent shot of Downtown Calgary in the distance.
And then we headed home and ended up outside the Okotoks church again, to catch the sun setting in the west.
All in all, a very satisfying day.
J&E
