A well known song.

Calgary to me is a well known city.

So what is the link between a city and a song?

Many will be familiar with me "Standing on a Street"" cornor in Winslow Arizona (if not look up The Eagles and their famous song),but their iis no bridge in Winslow of note.

Enter Stoney Trail in Calgary a ring road that like so many of the others such as Glenmore, Deerfoot,Blackfoot,Macleod & Peigan, must at times cross one of the two best known features in the city.

Elbow or Bow are the two rivers that Calgary sits astride. They are a dominant features even Centre Street the heart of the city crosses the Bow River.

Where I stay the Bow River is almost in the backyard. These rivers are fed from the Rockies and their snow coverage so at times they will overflow with spectacular and devistating results such as the 2013 with resulting deaths.

Some of you will be familiar with my 2016 blog when I visited Elbow Falls to see the masive destruction that the roaring water had inflicted on the picnic area and indeed the entire course the river took but shifting tens of thousands of tonnes of rock. My blog in this series called "when only the best will do"again covers the elbow falls area.

The photos with this blog also show what happened in the urban and downtown Calgary in the 2013 flood but do not depict the park areas and those methods put in place to survive this and past and do doubt will continue to influence decisions on the future of facilities in Calgary.

Today's visit fits into both the past preventative and the future as I spent time in Bowness Park in North West.

This iconic park has served the population for well over a century and originally was "so far removed from Calgary"as to be a holiday destination in the summer for citizens. Taking a day's travel and for those lucky ones the opportunity to rent one of the eight holiday cottages located within the park. Later transistions saw the park as Calgary's first amusement park , like a Coney Island of the US, with changing times such as better roads and the growth of Calgary the park was handed from private ownership to city ownership and evolved into a multi functional recreational area.

Bowness Park caters for fitness freaks, family picnics, boating,disabled outings,corporate events, fishing and swimming (illegal).

Much of the park was devasted by the 2013 flood but unlike Elbow Falls has been reconstructed for the community.

Bowness Park has a connection with Beaumont park as it lies on the opposite riverbank.

However with forethought the city has achieved two purposes with one connection.

To cater for the evergrowing traffic in Calgary when the land was taken over by the city it was noted that while the park was there for the people it contained a corridior for traffic and utilities.

The construction of Stoney Trail finished in 1997 which saw the park being the site for a crossing of the Elbow.

Stoney Trail now is literally above Bowness park thanks to a mighty bridge where each of the prefabricated concrete spans weighs 1000tonnes, but below this bridge using the same structure was constructed a freespanning suspension bridge for pedistrian traffic between the two parks a distance of 140m compared to a 6kms drive around. It promotes better access and a far wider scope of activities while being traffic free.

While my visit was a weekday and towards well actually the last day of summer the park had an abundance of people participating in all of the legal acticities I mentioned earlier and yes two young men who cant read and were swimming in the cold rapidly flowing river and yes I put a photograph of them safely on the bank to set your mind at ease as so many Calgarians have drown in these two rivers.

It was of interest to see so many people out today as Calgary is actually under a health warning for air quality as the city remains blanketed in smoke coming from the British Columbia wildfires that now have burnt for much of the 11 weeks I have been over here. However that is a small fire compared to the Fort McMurray AB which started on 1st May 2016 and was finally out on 2nd August some 458 days later.

Even driving back of a night time I can see from the street lights a distinctive pawl of smoke changing the colour of the lights and many photos especially of the surrounding moutains while are almost invisible in the photos. I commented also to my passenger that we could not even see the Calgary tower tonight despite it being normally a landmark feature from many kms distance.