Calgary
— — a prairie city looking up at mountains.
Not only on a wall.
“Calgary sits at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers in southern Alberta, on the prairie's last open ground before the Rockies. The mountains are about 80 kilometres west — close enough that the chinook winds run down off them and lift the temperature thirty degrees in an afternoon. Each July the Stampede takes over the centre of the city. The rest of the year, the rivers and the long light do the work.
Calgary, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Calgary lies in southern Alberta at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers, on the western edge of the Canadian Prairies and about 80 kilometres east of the Rocky Mountain front. The city sits at roughly 1,045 metres above sea level, the highest major city in Canada. Its population is about 1.3 million within city limits, making it the third-largest municipality in the country. The North-West Mounted Police founded Fort Calgary in 1875 at the river confluence; the city grew with the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1883.
The chinook is a warm, dry wind that descends the eastern slope of the Rockies and reaches Calgary on most winters. The city sees roughly 30 chinook days a year. The wind can lift the temperature 20 to 30 degrees Celsius in a few hours; the largest single-hour change recorded nearby, at Pincher Creek to the south, was 41 degrees. A chinook arch — a long band of clear sky over the mountains under a stationary cloud bank — is the local sign that one is on the way.
The Calgary Stampede has run for ten days each July since 1912, drawing about 1.3 million attendees and turning the city centre into a fairground of rodeo, chuckwagon racing, and exhibition. The grounds at Stampede Park sit on the east bank of the Elbow River, ten minutes' walk from downtown. Outside Stampede week the Rockies pull most of the visitor traffic — Banff is about an hour and a half west on the Trans-Canada Highway, and Lake Louise about two hours.