Yesterday behind the library on the one rare spot of bare grass were 6 or 7 sleeping elk.

Thank goodness they are not library patrons...

They looked like statues.

The elk are seldom in the actual town area. The park has worked to keep them on the fringes the last few years as tourists don't know to stay clear of the elk and there have been incidents where tourists have been attacked.

These elk were so deeply asleep as to be in a stupor but I did use a zoom lens and I was nowhere near this close to them. 

The other photos include a deer on our lawn one morning.

Views on the trip to and from and at the off-leash dog park - and of course a dog or two.

Rush Hour in Banff

A morning walk with Santiago today in warmer temperatures and beautiful sunshine.

There are a few pictures of deer -

which I had to take quickly as I had the dog with me and I did not want to disturb the deer - though Santi is very calm and pays them no heed thankfully.

There is one picture with bushes and several deer feeding in a neighbour's yard - try and find them all.

And the final picture is a raven on the roof I can see from the kitchen window. I tried to do a close-up and it is a bit blurry but you can see the raven drying his wings in the chinook wind.

The clouds make shapes in around and on top of the mountains so that the landscape looks changed. I took a great many pictures of the mountains and the clouds but I have only posted a few.

Alberto Manguel wrote the introduction for a book of photographs by Ernie Kroeger, entitled The Great Divide. Manguel writes, " Like prairie clouds (the Rocky Mountains) course sideways, occasionally melting into the clouds......(the mountains) present...an uneasy paradox: on the one hand they are a continuous jagged line that prevents the landscape from continuing on to the distant horizon; on the other, they are the horizon itself, ever-present and always just beyond the ultimate grasp."

I would add that the mountains force your eyes up to an infinite horizon, that of the sky, creating an boundless vista that reaches to infinity. I think that is one reason I so love this landscape. Though everyone warned I might feel claustrophobic here - I find the opposite is true I can see forever...it is just up instead of in a city which is usually across a street and into buildings that block the view.

Mind you that is after a winter of predominantly blue skies and sunshine. When it is misty or snowy and the mountains disappear it is an utterly different landscape...one which seems ungrounded without the mountains.

Elk kicking away the snow to find the grass to eat.There is also a phot of the 2 young bucks locking horns.

I went for a 12 kilometre walk today.

YES 12 kms.

A little stiff tonight.

Here are some of the views from the walk.

From downtown it is possible to walk along the valley to Sundance Canyon.

More pictures soon - including elk

which were sparring and banging their antlers together in play battle.