Blackfoot Crossing – The Amazing Sky

July 20, 2014

Rainbow at Blackfoot Crossing

A low rainbow shines beneath a retreating thunderstorm at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park.

On my way home from Waterton Lakes I drove through a thunderstorm, then watched it retreat and the Sun break through in the west. I was hoping for a rainbow in the east, and sure enough, one appeared.

With the Sun still high in the late afternoon sky, the rainbow was low, with just a small arc appearing above the horizon.

By good luck, I was passing the hilltop Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, a beautiful museum interpreting the history of the Siksika Nation, and a great place to look out over the prairie.

These photos look down a line of rock cairns running from the interpretive centre to the hilltop cemetery in the distance, below the arc of the bow.

This wider angle image gives the context, with the bow at the bottom of the thundercloud, and fresh blue sky above.

I love the mountains but it’s nice to be back home on the prairies where we can see the wide horizon.

June 23, 2013June 23, 2013

Floodwaters at Bow River Crossing

This is not a picture of the amazing sky but a document of what the sky can do when it decides to be merciless.

No one has seen anything like this in living memory, with homes under water and the river swollen to a lake engulfing the Bow River Valley.

These panoramas depict the heart of the Siksika First Nation, part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. It was in this valley, where the Blackfoot had traditionally held their summer camps, that Treaty 7 was signed in 1877 between Chief Crowfoot and James Macleod of the NWMP. The history of the area is presented at the beautiful Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park interpretive centre, shown in the image below. We’ve held several popular public stargazing sessions there. It was closed today, ironically due to a lack of safe water.

It was here at this spot in the Bow River Valley that nomadic hunters could easily cross the river. Up to this weekend a bridge, seen in the distance in the image below, had allowed modern travellers to make the crossing. But no more. The bridge is closed and may never reopen, until it is rebuilt. Today, water was roaring just below the bridge deck. And waters have receded in the last 24 hours.

There is some fear that a ferry downstream, the Crowfoot Ferry, one of the last river ferries in Alberta, might break loose and crash into the Bassano Dam.

Dozens of homes are underwater and hundreds of people displaced to evacuation shelters. The water came up so fast many people had just minutes to get out.

Those I spoke to today, including one 68-year-old resident, said they have never seen the Bow flood as bad as this. The high waters, having breached the Carseland Dam upstream from here, are now heading downstream to fill the Bassano Dam and flood the lower Bow and South Saskatchewan River through Medicine Hat. As those upstream clean up, those downstream prepare for the onslaught of water.

March 11, 2012

Bridging Earth and Sky (Off to Venus and Jupiter)

This was the scene Sunday night, March 11, as Venus edged up to Jupiter in the evening twilight.

To capture the nightscape I hunted around for a spot along the Bow River near home and settled for a site on the banks of the river at the point called Blackfoot Crossing, the traditional heart of the Siksika First Nation land. Here, the Bow River runs north-south for a stretch and the highway crosses the river heading west into the evening twilight, as if off into the sky to meet Venus and Jupiter in conjunction.

I waited until a passing car added the streak of tail lights, heading off into the sunset and starry sky. Nightscapes like this are often best taken when the sky is fairly dark but a longer exposure still brings out the remaining colours of twilight, as well as fainter stars, to make an image enhanced from what the eye might have seen.