When people think of Calgary, boats are the last thing that comes to mind, especially sail boats. We are five hundred miles from the sea in a geographical area called the Great Plains, or the Canadian Prairies. The Glenbow reservoir is an artificial lake, created by a dam on the Elbow river to control spring floods and store drinking water for the City of Calgary.
On Sunday I wrote about a walk near the other main source of drinking water for Calgary, the Bearspaw Reservoir. Both of these reservoirs are filled by runoff and glacial meltwater from the Canadian Rockies fifty or so kilometers west of here. The main difference is this reservoir is in the middle of the city. You can take the bus here and the park is surrounded by houses.
This is the perfect place to walk on a nice day, you can just make out the mountains in the background and there are paved pedestrian paths circling the entire body of water. Needless to say, it is popular for Calgarians and a desirable area to live, some of the nicest properties in the city are a short walk from here.
We like to mix it up a little when it comes to our walks. One can't drive to the mountains everyday, especially on weekdays and sometimes the weather doesn't cooperate. If you only have a couple of hours, there are a lot of parks in the city to explore.
There are two paths where it is busy to separate bikers from walkers. Is it just me or do you also think that those e-bikes have no place in parks? They provide next to no exercise, they are dangerously fast and they belong on the road. It gets on my nerves when we are walking with the family and some person beeps a horn and speeds by in excess of thirty kilometers an hour on these things.
The walk around the entire Reservoir is nearly fifteen kilometers. We were just here to enjoy the views and the crisp fall air. Since this weekend around the middle of October, it's been jacket weather. Jacket weather means below 10 degrees in Canada when it's sunny.
The photo isn't from the reservoir but we decided to take another walk that day and it was well worth the views. One has to take as much advantage as possible of a beautiful day. Those mountains are almost sixty kilometers away and this was taken with a phone camera, it gives you an idea of just how clean the skies are.
This is heritage village, it's an open air historic museum and park for children on a peninsula in the Glenbow Reservoir. They had a nice fall themed set up out front for those perfect Canadian Thanksgiving Photos. We will save a trip to heritage park for another day as the charge is quite steep to just go in and walk around for thirty minutes. Thank you for joining me on this walk and have a nice Wednesday!
All photos were taken with an s24 and are unfilitered