Calgarians were treated to a magnificent chinook-arch sunset as the work week ended Friday.Photo by Jeff McIntosh, Calgary Herald, published in the Saturday, December 16, 1997 Calgary Herald.
With the appearance of the distinctive Chinook Arch over the foothills,
it is a welcome relief during the cold winter months. With the onset of
a chinook, the atmospheric pressure changes rapidly, the winds can gust
up to 160 km per hour (100 mph) and the temperature changes dramatically.
The strongest Chinook effects occur in the Crowsnest Pass and Pincher Creek
area, they receive about 30 Chinook days a year and Calgary gets an average
of 25 days per year.The most rapid temperature change occurred on January
27, 1962 at Pincher Creek, Alberta. It was -20 degrees F. at midnight and
by 1:00 am it rose to plus 37 degrees F, a change of 57 degrees in 1 hour.
Chinooks can last for several hours to several days.
I wrote 'Spingtime' in the cabin that time when it chinooked and it went up 60 degrees overnight. The water was running like crazy. It drowned a bunch of cattle
Ian Tyson's from his biography I Never Sold My Saddle
So you live in the foothills of
the chinook zone? Think of May and a crabapple tree in full bloom reels
under the weight of wet snow. A bright July morning and you awaken to find
your garden blackened by a hard frost or snowstorm in August. Early December,
and you hang Christmas lights in a in shirtsleeves while the smoke of a
grass fire dims the horizon. Then, Boom, it forty below again.
If you live in a chinook area, you will know how hard it is to grow plants,
tree and gardens. The best book about gardening in a chinook area is Gardening
Under the Chinook Arch. If the book is not available at your local bookstore
you can write:
The Millarville Horticultural Club
c/o Mrs. Theresa Patterson
Site 30, Box 1 R.R. 8
Calgary, Alberta
ISBN 0-88925-406-0
The Chinook, a warm Pacific
wind that blows in a broad belt along the eastern slopes of the Rockies
turning winter into a temporary spring, is the stuff of myth and legend.
Known to hurl a freight train off its tracks and make trees grow parallel
to the ground, it carved out the plains and created the cowboy life.
Sid Marty's search for the Chinook is a grand interweaving of Native legend,
pioneer tales, cowboy myths, wildlife stories and often haunting insights
into a force that has indelibly marked life on the southern prairie and
foothills of Alberta and Montana.
Warm, wry and brilliantly amusing, Leaning on the Wind is also a personal
journey -- a quest into the land of Sid Marty's ancestors and neighbours
in which he encounters his abandoned family homestead, a gathering of cowboy
poets and a school for rodeo clowns -- not to mention a psychopathic grouse.
Throughout his journey, the chinook dances and rages, a powerful connector
in this entertaining, richly epic portrait of the profound relationship
among people, culture and natural forces.
Harper Collins Canada. ISBN 0-00-255059-8. $27.00.