Every morning of the week when I head into work, I spend a good several minutes driving straight at the city. We’re literally 5 minutes from the core of downtown, and there’s this perfect moment that I look forward to, even on the dreariest or most tired of days, when I come over the slight hill around a corner and the Calgary skyline comes fully into view. It’s my zen moment; I see the Rockies off in the distance framed by high-rise buildings of varying heights and designs, and I can’t help but notice the sky.
Calgary has an interesting sky, much different than the skies of Indiana that I’m used to. Calgary is positioned in a unique location for weather patterns, as it sits below the meeting point of a Föhn winds pattern. This meeting point and struggle of wind currents causes all kinds of fluctuations with our weather, and the results have been coined a ‘chinook‘. The chinook phenomenon produces mild winters, which explains why we’ll suddenly go from -10 to 20 in a 24 hour period. Either way, the varying wind currents moshing all together on the dance floor make the clouds look like they’re doing the tango, and sometimes it makes the sky almost seem like it’s upside down. I love it.

And then I cut north and it’s all behind me until later in the afternoon, when the only sure thing about the weather is that it means the sky will look completely different. Either way, I’ve decided to start taking photos of the sky whenever possible, because the opportunity presents itself often and the view is always fresh and new. Most recently I took a few pictures of the sky at a Stampeders exhibition game back in the middle of June, and then another photo a few days later, just after a heavy rain and hail storm that produced a pretty rainbow visible from our back window. I only wish I had a camera this morning — I love the way the sky looks when a storm is rolling through. In the same sky you’ll see both dark and menacing clouds alongside bright and sunny clouds, and that was what it was like this morning. Next time I’ll have a camera, but for now you can see what I’ve got in the ‘Calgary Skies’ directory under Miscellaneous in our Gallery.

In other news, it’s the famous Stampede Week here in Calgary. On one hand, I wish it were Stampede Week all year long because it means I can wear jeans into the office each day, but on the other hand, there’s only so much of cowboy boots and hats that I can take in my normal daily routine. There are some truly dedicated one-week-a-year-cowboys in the heart of downtown who even go as far as to put up fake wooden storefronts on their sleek city buildings, complete with bales of hay and silhouettes of cowboys leaning against fence posts. It’s insane. And I keep hearing about how hot it is lately, especially after we hit 36 degrees last week (that’s just under 100 degrees F for those of you that are like me and will forever think in Fahrenheit). To be honest, I’d never have known it was “so hot” unless someone had told me, because 100 degrees in Calgary and 100 degrees in Indiana are two very different things. I’ll take 100 degrees of dry heat in Calgary over 100 degrees of heat plus 90+ percent humidity in Indiana anyday!

Happy Stampeding!