Fish Creek Provincial Park

Fish Creek Provincial Park, Calgary, AB. September 11, 2014.

* * *

I just got home from the Under Western Skies conference in Calgary, where I stayed at my friend Tessa's house. Tessa and I have known each other for fifteen years now, so it was very comfortable to stay with her family...

This is the only picture worth sharing from a walk I did with Tessa's family to the nearby Fish Creek Provincial Park.

We found a few other mushrooms, but were rapidly losing the light...and I was so grateful to be walking, to be looking on flood-downed trees and underbrush for mushrooms, after three late nights, after three days of snow, broken trees and icy freeways, attending the conference, that it didn't matter.

Fish Creek was severely damaged by last year's Calgary flood. But the pedestrian bridge, which had been washed away by the floodwaters, was open again. And we thankfully didn't see very many new downed branches...but there was still lots of debris and downed trees leftover from the flood that lined the main path. 

People were calling this week, with heavy snowfall on trees still in full leaf, 'treemageddon.' Apparently about 3,800 'tree emergencies' were called into the city of Calgary's 311 line.

It's easy to define tree emergency when even the trees lining the freeway have branches down. On the Mount Royal campus, they used police tape to cordon off paths where several trees had come down and Thursday afternoon was full of the sound of trees shedding heaps of melting snow.
   
It had been two days of stories on traditional media and networks like Facebook about overburdened trees falling on houses and cars, cutting power and blocking streets.

But on Thursday, there was sun and people walking and most of the snow had cleared. 

(More later on this conference itself...)