Fish Creek

Fish Creek is my local park in Calgary. It's about 10 miles long, and perhaps a mile wide at its greatest extent. Because it is situated at the bottom of steep-sided slopes, there is a definite feeling that you have stepped out of the city as soon as you enter the park, and the forest closes in. The creek flows from the Rockies to the southwest and serves as a wildlife corridor. Deer, coyote, bald eagles and osprey are fairly common in the park, plus the occasional sighting of bears, cougars and bobcats, which the City tries to relocate to the mountains whenever they are spotted. Visibility is often less than 20 m, so tracking animals down can be pretty difficult.

The park also houses cycle paths that link into the main network of pathways in the city - I can ride 20 km to work via this park and the Bow River parkway system, spending only 2 km on asphalt. On Christmas Eve I used the park to ski to work. I'm not sure I'll do that again for a while though; the snow was a combination of thigh-deep baseless powder over thick vegetation and skimmed, packed snow less than a cm thick on the cleared pathways. Neither made for great skiing.