Live and In Colour

"Can we go to the beach when you're home?"

It's a simple-enough question, with a simple-enough answer.

But sometimes a day at the beach with one kid becomes a weekend in Calgary with two, and that's exactly what happened on my days off at the end of April.

Beach on Friday, zoo on Saturday? Sure, why not.

All three of us had been to the Calgary Zoo before, but every visit is different. There were new displays, new animals out and about, and afterward, I decided to play with black & white for a slightly new take on some old favourites.

We were all fans of the penguins.

These guys and their eyebrows! 

 

Meerkats.

Black and white on black and white. 

And this superstar pose.

He legit winked at me!!!!

I took so many pictures of these silly-looking things.

and you could go right into 'Land of Lemurs'!

She wanted to see the giraffes. 

Baby gorilla sucking his thumb: check.

 I wanted to see the butterfly sanctuary.

Randomly patrolling the grounds...

Guess what day it is!

Hump Day!

He wanted to see the panda bears.

This guy was all about having his picture taken, but then got a little shy.

Tiger pose.

Ridiculous monkeys had us cracking up going after the food the keeper was tossing onto their enclosure.

This guy kinda made me wanna get up to 15% off insurance. 

The baboon had so much expression in his eyes. He looks so sad.

I've been fortunate to have been taken behind the scenes at the Calgary Zoo. I know they treat the animals well. I know the animals do not spend their lives in one place unless they are required to due to sickness or injury, in which case they are taken care of. I know they are fed, entertained, and cared for down to the smallest detail.

But still, this tugged at my heartstrings a little more than I expected, and I had to walk away:

In the Canadian Wilds zone, the wolves were out, there was a bear at the top of a tree, and groundhogs made faces at my camera. The bighorn sheep were resting in the shade, the bison had a serious lack of cares in the world, and the mountain goat finally put himself on display for all to see!

The day was hot but the company was cool, and it was so fun to see a different array of animals than the last visit I had made to the zoo. It was also pretty neat to spend some time with these only slightly more domesticated creatures:

and to know that when their parents are away, I can always borrow the stunt-doubles for a good ol' fashioned road trip.

Picture This

Prior to my first trip to Alberta in 2009, I had a pretty specific picture in my head of how I expected the prairie provinces to look. Though I arrived at that time to a glorious city, snowy Rocky Mountains, and glacier-carved canyons full of hoodoos and dinosaur remnants, that original concept of Alberta has also stayed in my mind. As it turns out, that image also exists both in the east and in the south of the province.

Oil drilling apparatus, known as derricks, litter the skyline in the most seemingly random of places.

Grain refineries that break the vastness of the landscape dot the highways and lesser-travelled roads alike.

Silos... and if you get close enough to the US border, the mountains of Montana for a background.

These next three were drive-by's: literally shot from the highway in a moving vehicle. The black and whites are absolutely perfect.

Someone's little utopia on the prairies got flooded out with the spring melt, but it made it all the more photogenic to me.

And of course, there are miles and miles and miles where Alberta best lives up to it's image of dirt roads, farmers' fields, and Great. Big. Sky.

The World's Tallest Teepee

Medicine Hat, Alberta is home to the world's tallest teepee: the Saamis Teepee, originally built for the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. I didn't know any of that until I arrived in the town on April 29 and saw the 65.5 metre structure looming in the distance.

At sunset.

 "Do you wanna stop?"

Well, duh.

Writing On Stone

Writing-On-Stone Provincial Park boasts another remarkable piece of the western canadian landscape. We were driving along the highway, noting the miles and miles of flat expanse, when suddenly, there it was below us: a huge gorge, flowing river, and hoodoos as far as the eye can see. It was like walking into a scene from The Flintstones, and I couldn't wait to get in among the houses of Bedrock. As my cohort (who I only just then learned hadn't been here before either, though he was born and raised in southern Alberta) ventured into the interpretive centre for maps and points of interest, I practically ran over the cliff and into... this:

Those mountains in the distance are Montana, again, less than 20km as the crow flies.

For some perspective on how huge everything was, that's an adult man standing way up there!

The sun was an incredible 29C, and we hadn't planned on the intense heat. So with only a small supply of water, we marked this bench as our end point, and turned around.

We walked along the path at the base of the hoodoos for a different view on the way back.

Back to the parking lot at the top of the ravine...

We consulted the map and decided there was one more thing that couldn't be missed, known simply as "The Battle Scene".

"The Battle Scene is one of the most elaborate rock art carvings found on the North American great plains. It depicts a large force of warriors attacking an encampment of tipis, defended by a line of guns. Most the attacking figures are on foot, but eleven horses are also shown, some dragging travois. On the left, a circle of tipis surrounds several groups of human figures. Note the small figures found inside the central tipi and the two figures in the centre of the carving, one striking the other with a hatchet." 

~from Writing-On-Stone Park Brochure

Down into the ravine we go again.

But it wasn't far until we found what we were looking for.

Unfortunately, people are lame, and over the years have chosen to vandalize the site by carving their name or profanity into the rock directly surrounding the scene. The area is now fenced off to prevent further damage, with spaces provided in the fencing to allow for clear photography. The minimal options for angles and the direct afternoon sunlight prevented much in the way of creative license for photos, but I did manage to capture the above shot for posterity and if you look close, you can definitely see some of the details of the carving. It was pretty mind-blowing to think that we were standing on the very place that the Blackfoot natives documented their lives on the rock somewhere around 150 years ago.