Hornets take Canucks through the 10+ smoke screen

Spinal Tap would have called this “an eleven”. The Air Quality Health Index called it a 10+ in Calgary on Saturday morning due to the smoke heading east from hundreds of forest fires in BC. It was enough of a health risk for the annual Ride to Conquer Cancer to be cancelled just after the start in Calgary. By game time at 2:00 pm the conditions had improved by a tad but it still felt like I had smoked ten Woodbines as I photographed the rugby games. For the players slogging it out at Calgary Rugby Union, it must have felt like a twenty pack. Definitely not good for the lungs.

The Calgary Canucks were leading 26-22 with sixteen mintes of the Alberta Cup game remaining but it was the Calgary Hornets who got through the smokescreen in better shape to win handsomely over the Canucks, 43-26 in the Division 1 game. In the following Division 2 game, The Canucks came out handsomely on top, 44-10, a score that doesn’t reflect the efforts of the Red Deer Titans who kept going hard to the end. With that win, and a corrected score from last week (it was a win, not a draw to the Beaver Boys) the Canucks take a berth in the Alberta Division 2 playoffs.

Please visit J. Ashley Nixon Communications for more photographs through the haze.

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