The sky was on fire.

Looked like it, anyway. The sun was rising behind me and blasting the chinook clouds to the west with a spray of orange, red and amber light that made the wispy tops of the still-forming chinook arch look like I was heading down the highway into a raging conflagration. Gotta say, not a bad way to start a day.

I was headed west toward the mountains, not sure yet where to go. The forecast for the day was warm and windy — hence that fiery chinook arch — so wherever I went to the west, it was going to be sunny and blustery. For the moment, though, all I was thinking about was getting pictures of that magnificent sky.

A sky that was fading fast. By the time I hit the edge of a barley field right on Calgary’s western limits, the colour had already begun to leach from the bottom of the arch. And within another five minutes or so, the sun had risen high enough that most of the warm light had cooled and the clouds were back to the bluish-grey they had been before the sun popped up.

Still, it was a glorious morning and if that sunrise was as good as the day got, I was already a happy boy.

The sky now calm again, I rolled on south and west, first to check for elk and autumn leaves at the Cross Conservancy just a couple kilometres west of that barley field and then on into the foothills. Of elk, there were none, and of leaves, very few. Fall might officially be here but a lot of the trees haven’t checked their email notifications.

There was a bit of fall colour at a pond just down the road, though it looked like the leaves had just started to turn. Fortunately, the water in the pond was calm and mirror-like, the wind promised by that chinook arch not having kicked up yet, and the trees reflected perfectly on its surface. Down along the shore I found a spider web that was shimmering prismatically in the bright sun. A lady and her dog walked by as I was shooting my pictures and the air was so still that, after exchanging good-mornings, I could hear all six of their feet crunching the gravel even when they were a hundred metres away.

That stillness only lasted another half hour. By the time I hit the Tongue Creek valley the wind had started to blow. The ruffed grouse I found along the road looked like it had been blown in from the west. And at Eden Valley, it was shaking the truck.

But there was some colour.

A few of the cottonwoods along the Highwood River had already turned and their lemony leaves rattled and thrashed in the gusts. The pastures around them were tawny and brown and laid flat by the wind. On the hillsides I could see patches of yellow where a few aspens had turned and there were clumps of red rose leaves all along the road.

Still, the leaves weren’t........

© Calgary Herald