Bowness Park Lagoon

There was nothing like a hot summer day in Bowness Park when I was a kid. I discovered it shortly after we moved to Calgary, Alberta, when I was nine years old and I spent a lot of time there.

Most of the park was accessible by vehicle when I was younger and I remember it being this way up until I moved away from Calgary in 1992. I was therefore somewhat surprised to discover that most of the road access — and parking — had disappeared during a winter visit in 2021 after the fam fam and I landed in Strathmore.

Most of the memories there are pretty good, such as having a picnic with my mom where we cooked hobo packets on a camp stove at the west end of the park back when it had camp stoves and there was free firewood available for use in them. There was also biking up and down the trails by the west lagoon canal, walking along the bank of the Bow River, catching bugs and occasionally swimming in the lagoon (that last one is a no no), having a picnic there with my gran and eating her egg salad sandwiches, and playing jarts (lawn darts) with the kids of one of mom’s friends. They’d call SWAT on you these days if you played jarts in a public park, I’m sure.

The lagoon was as beautiful as ever and had only changed minimally. It looked the same, smelled the same, and the local, er, artwork, was consistent with what I recollect from my youth.

There is also public art of a more conventional nature, at least until someone tags it with another peen. I’m sure that’s not far off.

Boats have been available for rent at the park for as long as I can recall. Pedal boats are the most popular option followed by canoes, which are more expensive and much less idiot proof, at least in theory. I spotted some kayaks as well, and assume they appeared over the last decade-ish as their popularity grew. The boat rental shack itself is fairly recent. The decrepit one from my childhood was a victim of the 2013 floods in Calgary.

The pedal boats are still a bit of a sore point for me more than four decades on. As I have mentioned previously, we were poor. So poor that we worried about food, paying the rent, etc. My mother gave me a rare treat one summer; I was allowed to rent a pedal boat with her at Bowness Park to run it around the lagoon for an hour. My birthday is in November so it is always cold and miserable and I never got to do the fun things on my birthday that other kids did. This one time I got a fun outdoor activity to make up for eleven years of cold birthdays.

It would have been great if the pedal boat had worked, which it barely did. It became obvious after ten minutes of hard pedaling that we had a bum unit after barely making it out of the rental bay. We laboriously crawled back and were told no more boats were available for the day because of a waiting list, so we would have to just keep going or come back another day. We tried to keep going, which we shouldn’t have. I think we made it as far into the lagoon as the place where the nice new boat launch is now. It’s not far from the boat rental shack at all. I can get there in less than a minute from the rental dock on my paddle board.

I couldn’t pedal that hard as I was only eleven at the time and my heart condition ran me out of steam quickly. Most of the load fell to my mom who promptly had an insulin reaction from the exertion. We crawled back to the boat rental shack, returned the pedal boat early, and found my mom some sugar. I have always felt a bit burned over that ever since.

I had my own watercraft with me this trip, which is my oversize Skatinger inflatable paddle board as shown above. I must say that it worked out much better than the old pedal boat. I was able to make it around most of the lagoon, except for the exreme west end of the lagoon canal where the water got too shallow and I was dragging fin. Water levels are down this year and not much can be done about that.

This time on the Bowness Lagoon I was able to get where I wanted to and quickly. I more or less made two circuits of the entire place, which turns out to be almost 7 km of paddling. Not bad.

BYOB (Bring Your Own Boat) is common at the lagoon these days. There were lots of folks with Stand Up Paddle Boards (SUPS), some with hard kayaks, and even the odd folding kayak. The latter are made out of a tough, corrugated cardboard that folds up like origami. They are lightweight, expensive, and seem very fragile. I would not want one after getting a close look at a few of them.

Private residences along the park back onto the lagoon and most of the homeowners have their watercraft placed near the shore. There are a lot of kayaks, paddle boards, and canoes. Most of the canoes seem kind of aged, like they are falling out of favour these days.

There are parts of the west lagoon canal that are hauntingly beautiful if you catch them in the right light with relatively still water. These are hard to see from the shore, so it’s best to be on the water for them. I managed to get decent video as I slowly floated through the area above…

There are also some creepy bits with skeletal looking trees that are poking out out of the water with some partially blocking the canal. I’d say three quarters of folks turned back at this point, which was a shame. There were still some good sights ahead.

Today’s photos and videos are courtesy of my phone and my OM System (formerly Olympus) Tought TG-7. I don’t believe I have shared images of it here yet, so I am overdue. I wouldn’t say it’s a “good” camera, rather that it is “good enough”. I got a good deal on a used unit as one new is overpriced. The one feature it has that is very neat is it will maintain a GPS track of your shoot, and I use that on every trip now.

I had wanted to make several trips here this summer, but circumstances conspired against me. The weather wasn’t right. Family emergencies took priority. Worst of all, I completely misjudged how popular the park had become in the years since I left Calgary. I’d like to try and make it back one more time with my daughter who missed out this year, but…

We’re nearly at the middle of the month of September, the leaves are starting to turn, and a chill appeared in the air today. Maybe I’ll luck out and get some Indian Summer, but I’m not counting on it. We’re a week or so away from Bowness lagoon being full of dead leaves instead of paddle boards. Depressing.

There is always next year, right?

Images from today’s outing courtesy of a Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra and a OM System Tough TG-7. Video is from the Samsung, which runs circles around the OM System for video quality.