Perhaps a year or so back Team BIGDoer was approached by Rueben Tschetter, a well respected film producer and videographer with Cache Productions, Red Deer Alberta. Seems he’d been watching some of what we were up to â exploring abandoned places and ghost towns and chronicling the experience â and...
Some unremarkable photos here, nothing special technically or artistically, just a big fat blah in every way. If not for the subject that is. There’s the magic. Look at this place, look close, a cute little house in a small Saskatchewan town, sealed up for many years. Peer inside, the...
This here is a scared place folks. The building seen in back of Connie, home to a furniture store, was long ago a factory where Boler Trailers were produced. Yes, in this very building, just off 16th Avenue Northeast Calgary (visible from the âTrans-Canadaâ), they pumped out those little egg-shaped...
Coming soon to BIGDoer.com! Here’s some new stuff we’ve been working on, a sampling of what’s in the pipeline, places documented over the last number of months that will be posted here soon enough. We’re itching to show you! Included are abandoned things, old farms and ranches, some of them...
Hunchback Hills, in one of the quieter areas of Kananaskis, are an interconnected series of bumps worthy of a visit. You can hike all of them as part of an extended horseshoe route of sorts – best done by those with good nav skills. Or you can make an out...
A drive down a dusty back road finds us in Loverna Saskatchewan. We’ve arrived! The community is that close to earning the title of âghost townâ and wandering quiet streets, we pass empty buildings, some near collapse, vacant lots, forgotten churches and other scattered remnants of human habitation. The silence,...
At a bend in the creek, in a secluded little coulee, we find the remains of the GBB Ranch. There used to be a lot of structures here, a good sized house, numerous sheds, outbuildings and corrals and other stuff. Today, there’s a collapsed barn, a couple pieces of old...
Came this close â I mean a hair width is wide in comparison close – to calling this post âBury me when I die at the Alberta Railway Museumâ. Heck, I even hinted at it in a preview of this article. As a train buff I’d relish the opportunity spending...
On a frigid weekend, April 2017, Chris ‘n’ Connie roll into east-central Saskatchewan accompanied by friends. We’re here filming a documentary âForgotten Prairieâ, a production highlighting this crazy obsession we have with all things abandoned and old. This day’s stop is the tiny little (almost) ghost town of Hoosier Saskatchewan....
The Red Deer River Valley is one of the more stunning places you can visit in the province. Those awesome Alberta Badlands, a wondrous setting, geologically interesting, historically fascinating and of course visually mind blowing. It’s pure magic for the senses. And because of all these qualities, it can be...
Chris rushed in excitedly and showed me this comparison, but after a short pause, his look changed. It's that confused expression one gets just before the face-palm, when they realize something they did just doesn't add up.
One year shy of a century separates the two images but as it turns out, they're not even of the same building. The top is Westmount School and the bottom McDougall School, both in Edmonton and not far from each other.
It took this long to realize we'd been shooting at the wrong place all this time! The two schools were built in the same year and very close in design, so it's still an interesting comparison. We had a good laugh and we'll give Chris a mulligan on this one.
Looks like we're going have to head back for a do-over.
Exploring history with Off the Beaten Path with Chris & Connie. Photos: 1924 and 2023. Submitted by Connie.
It's amazing how many of these Canada Centennial Maples Leafs still exist out in the wild across the prairies. We could fill an album with the ones we've photographed. It seems rural folks embraced patriotism with more fervor than their urban counterparts, but that's just an observation.
This example was found in a small Saskatchewan town. When they placed this up above the community hall there was a certain optimism that's not seen now. Today, only a handful of people call the community home, and it's that close to being a true ghost town. Almost sixty years in place and this memorial to a 100 year celebration is still here.
If our readers have found any of these while out exploring, please share in the comments. We'd love to see them.
Exploring history with Off the Beaten Path with Chris & Connie. Photo: 2014. Submitted by Connie.
Billy Clarkâs Cabin in Meadow Creek BC and it dates back over a century. Now at the local museum it formerly stood in a valley a little to east and on the shores of Duncan Lake (now Ducan Lake Reservoir).
Billy was a trapper, hunter, and woodsman. All he had was this tiny log house, a small plot of land, the surrounding wilderness, and his wits for survival. Nothing more. That spirit of self reliance seems to be a lost art today.
Exploring history with Off the Beaten Path with Chris & Connie. Photo: 2022. Submitted by Connie.
Both Chris and I both grew up in the malaise era for cars and get giddy when we spot one from that time out in the wild. It's like meeting an old friend. This '80s beauty was found out in a hiking area of Kananaskis and by all appearances, looks to be driven regularly.
The malaise era is marked by cars with uninspired design, quirky traits, hobbled performance and often questionable quality. Depressing stuff. This Cutlass is probably one of the better GM cars of the time, and both Chris and our son Will have owned examples in the past.
Have a malaise era story or photo to share? Post it in the comments!
Out in nature with Off the Beaten Path with Chris & Connie. Photo: 2023. Submitted by Connie.
We come over many rises on a the prairies and on doing so surprised by many interesting things. This one caused a double take.
This lonely locomotives sits at the then very end of track outside Leader SK and was out of service at the time. Guess they socked it away out of sight to forget about it. We found photos showing it in service the year before our visit but here it was cold and dead.
Since this photo was taken, the Great Sandhills Railway has extended the track across the road and set up some kind of transloading operation. In years passed, the track (under CP ownership) continued west all the way into Alberta, but that's a distant memory.
Exploring history with Off the Beaten Path with Chris & Connie. Photo: 2014. Submitted by Connie.
The messages have been coming fast and often. No, the book we produced a couple years back is not being published after all, in spite of appearing on many websites recently. Oddly some are showing it with the cover from another volume altogether. Please don't order and it must be a glitch.
The other two books shown in our capture are available however (and are awesome) and were produced by some friends. Interestingly, Chris contributed to each and those you can order.
Exploring history with Off the Beaten Path with Chris & Connie. Submitted by Connie.
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