A horrible hike at home

This walk was back in October 2024. I played around with maps like I usually do, and found what might be Calgary’s least scenic walk. Even better, it’s right by home.

52nd Street East is probably Calgary’s longest street that isn’t a freeway. It runs almost perfectly straight from McKnight Blvd (which would be 48th Ave N) to 200th Ave S, or around there. So in theory, 248 blocks of the most nondescript and un-scenic, yet somehow typical Calgary: mostly suburban, but also passing close to two landfills and the Foothills industrial park. Perfect.

Here is my attempt.

I take the #23 bus south from home and got off at 130th Ave SE. I did it on a whim and really should have started earlier, because of the sun setting earlier. Crossing large streets at night isn’t fun.

Here’s the start: a big box complex. It’s pretty unremarkable: some provincial MLA offices, chain stores, some local franchises.

Then, it’s a long slog beyond an empty field on one side (with solar panels) and the Shepard landfill in sight on the other. Thankfully, the smell isn’t bad.

On long stretches like this with nothing in particular to look at, I try to get into a meditative state. I don’t use headphones so my strategy is to draw attention to small things in the here and now. Focussing on breathing and what my senses are taking in works a treat: the wind rushing across the tall grasses by the fence, the blue skies and lofty clouds, the way the sounds of the cars change when passing over new pavement. Imagine forest bathing, but along an “ugly” loud roadside.

I sometime imagine it’s like being a wanderer from hundreds of years ago suddenly being dropped into the present, a way to defamiliarize the familiar landscape I’ve passed hundreds of times in a car.

I leave the vacant field and enter the industrial park. The Foothills industrial park is an older one, mostly warehouses, niche commercial suppliers, with a little light industry, like fabrication shops for the oil and gas industry.

Thankfully, it’s overcast and breezy: great walking conditions. As I cross a bridge over the railway and an irrigation canal, I glimpse the mountains.

This next half hour is a surreal blur. There’s a certain style of warehouse, with exposed pebbled concrete walls that seems to have been popular when this area was built up, maybe in the 1970s and 1980s.

Walking in industrial parks is a bizarre experience because they’re typically not meant to ever be walked. Sure, there are sidewalks, but I imagine relatively few people make use of them by choice. The architecture of warehouses and strip malls reflects the ultimate desire to make construction as cheap as possible. So most are austere, generic, and bland. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone call a warehouse beautiful. Yet these ugly buildings and places are vital to our way of life.

I’ve experienced deja vu on these urban hike before with fast food restaurants, drive throughs, and gas stations, but I get a whole new experience here. There are three Gregg’s Distributors–a supplier of industrial parts and supplies–in the city, and I somehow passed by two of them. Seeing the second one, in a near-identical building, arranged on a similar lot on a northwestern street corner, is a surreal experience, akin to when Bill Murray wakes up in Groundhog Day. Did I somehow walk in a circle, by going in a straight line?

I cross Peigan Trail¹, and enter the community of Erin Woods. It’s at the corner of a continuous residential area, bordered on two sides by industry. There’s an arena where I played hockey a few times, but otherwise it’s pretty ordinary suburb which I have almost no memory of.

After passing a few junkyards and the Calgary Fire Department’s training grounds (there’s a little smoke rising), I find a bathroom at a grocery store on 17th Avenue SE. My route is devoid of the usual amenities like libraries and parks, until this point.

Now I’m in Forest Lawn, a former independent town since absorbed into the city of Calgary. It has a terrible reputation in Calgary, being a byword for crime and poverty. Daniel Herriges at Strong Towns has written an excellent article here on how the ideas of neighbourhoods as “good” or “bad” are problematic, and very multi-faceted. My memories of Forest Lawn are pretty ordinary, though, going grocery shopping at the Asian supermarkets, and eating at the very traditional Vietnamese restaurants with family and friends.

This part of 52nd Street I’ve walked before, so it’s a pretty quick two miles, skipping the library, passing big box complexes and some cinder block traffic noise walls. I cross the 16th Avenue expressway, and I’m home.

This “hike” was far from the worst, in large part thanks to the weather, 15 C (59F) and overcast. Call it a portion hike of 52nd Street.

1. One of Calgary’s idiosyncrasies is that the word “Trail” is used for freeways and larger roads, with no real way to tell the difference from the name. Did you know that Deerfoot Trail was named after a Siksika runner? I didn’t. For more on the story of Indigenous names for roads, see this article at Sprawl Calgary ↩︎