Anne Elliott's photos with the keyword: off Highway 1

My camera doesn't always capture a colour correctly and, in this case, the rather pale blue should be more of a deep Prairie Gentian blue. This flower does remind me of some other flower, but I can't, for the life of me, think what. There were several of these bushy plants growing not far from the railway line, at Seebe, west of Calgary. Photographed yesterday, 17 October 2015, when I went on a birding outing with six friends, west of Calgary. I'm guessing, a garden escapee? Thanks to Larri Cochran for the ID - Echium vulgare! www.luontoportti.com/suomi/en/kukkakasvit/vipers-bugloss We travelled west of the city, the direction that I don't often get to see, mostly along Highway 1, turning off in a few places, including Seebe, to see what species we could find. Overall, it was a very quiet day as far as birding goes. Will add a list of species seen, when our leader, Andrew Hart, has posted the finished account. At one particular pond (seen in another photo I posted today), we watched several distant Swans, which are always nice to see. They were just off to the left and right of my photo. This is part of the trumpeter swan’s migratory path. While my friends were checking out the few other waterfowl, I just had to turn around and take a few photos of an old orange/red barn in the distance. I wasn't sure just where we were, but last night I went on Google Earth and eventually found the exact place. I also discovered that there is a whole lot more about this barn and the ranch it belongs to. For one thing, it also has a whole movie set in Western theme (i.e. old saloon, etc.), which has been used in a long list of movies. I'm adding a link to a detailed account of the Ranch by The Western Producer, posted on 27 August 2012 by Barbara Duckworth. It provides a lot of interesting information. This Ranch family emphasizes watershed management on 18,000 acres of land. www.producer.com/2012/08/ranch-uses-tranquil-setting-to-d... www.clranches.com/ clwesterntown.com/

After waiting about a year to get back to Bow Valley Provincial Park (W of Calgary), to see the wonderful display of wildflowers, it turned out to be a very wet day for us. Everywhere was so green and clean and fresh and the flowers looked beautiful covered in raindrops. However, I completely forgot that water droplets can cause blur in a photo and almost all my photos needed to be deleted. I think this image was taken from the Many Springs Trail, full zoom, so even though it looks as if we were walking high up in the mountains, the trail was actually down at road level. Something is definitely wrong with Flickr this morning. I posted my "daily three" images almost four hours ago and it shows only a total of 10 views for the three photos together. Not one comment, which is highly unusual. I mention this only because it's obvious that Flickr is not working properly. Anyone else experiencing this? Just checked My Contacts' new photos and there are only photos uploaded by four people, so my photos are most likely not showing up on their pages, either! I guess that's another problem, sigh. 8 hours later - just got home, and found that there has been basically no activity on my photos from today. Just left a message on the Help Forum. Hey, Flickr - what's going on? Something needs fixing! Please .....

Taken along Many Springs Trail, Bow Valley Provincial Park on June 24th. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypripedium