Calgary Trip – Continued

When I last left you we had arrived at Lake Louise.  The lake is glacier fed, and as you can see from this panorama I took, is an odd shade of blue-green.  This is due to the suspended rock dust scraped off by the glacier on its trip down to the lake.  Although I didn’t take the time to do so, the boats and canoes you can rent over to the left side of the lake look like fun.  Over to the right, you can see the lodge right by the lake.

I posted this one before, but I have to tell the story.  I’m not a photographer, but I’ve learned a few tricks to make photos interesting.  One is to put something in the foreground, like an overhanging branch from a tree.  Another is to choose an unusual angle.  Put the two together and you get this photo.

To get the rocks into the foreground required me to lie flat on my stomach on the path.  This is not the first time I’ve used this angle in a photo, and it always seems to make other tourists laugh…or wonder if I’m injured.  For example, here’s where I used it in Shanghai.

Half a dozen young, Chinese students came over to offer to help me up :).

After the lake, I continued up the highway to see some more glaciers.  For example, there’s this one, which looks like a claw, even though the bottom talon has just about melted away with climate change.

Continue a while longer and you’ll come to Bow Lake and its associated Glacier.

Then you notice the sun is starting to go down, and there isn’t a gas station within 80 miles and you’re below a quarter tank, so you turn around.

Maybe it’s Canada. maybe it’s the remote west, but there isn’t a gas station at every overpass coming back from the mountains into Calgary.  In fact, I was getting buzzes and beeps and blinking gas pumps on my dashboard when I was finally able to pull into one, but I did manage to escape the embarrassment of running out of gas on a  remote Canadian highway.

There was supposed to be more of this – more pictures, different parts of Calgary, but I came down with an unexpected chest cold my last day at work there and couldn’t get out of bed the following Saturday I had set aside for more tourism.  I guess I’ll have to go back.  For one thing, I want to ride the bobsled and the ziplines.

Calgary Olympic Site