Off the Beaten Path with Chris & Connie

Today we’re looking at remains of the Hermitage of Saint Elias, a former Monastery connected to the Eastern Orthodox Church. The location is a wooded grove and it’s all hidden away along a lonely Northern Alberta back road. This cluster of small cobbled-together buildings are in varying states of advanced...

Long ago, there were once thousands of little one-roomers like Liberty School scattered across rural Alberta. There were so many that we doubt an accurate count is even possible. Typically located along some remote middle-of-nowhere backroad, they were in service of students living on nearby farms or ranches. Their location...

The lonely grain elevator in Kirkpatrick Alberta is a survivor and has stood silent vigil for about a century. It outlasted the railway line that served it, and the various companies that owned it. This prairie sentinel has endured while so many other wooden elevators have fallen. Normally torn down...

Loaf N’ Jug were a small chain of convenience stores in Calgary Alberta in the 1970s and ’80s. The business never really flourished as envisioned, and at best are a faint memory in the collective consciousness of long-time residents of this city. To everyone else, they’re an unknown. Competition in...

This home, this barn and everything else you see on this property once served a unique purpose. Operating as a fully functioning “demonstration farm”, near Vulcan Alberta, and tied to the Canadian Pacific Railway, it was a show piece from over a century ago promoting the region’s agricultural potential. Come,...

The old grain elevator seen in this post is pretty much all that’s left of Sharples Alberta. The location is a shallow valley, scenic, sort of unprairie-like and home to a meandering creek. It’s a nice, idyllic setting. This building has stood abandoned for greater than forty years and while...

One day, out of the blue, Connie asked about the number of houses left in downtown Calgary. This happened some years back (2014), and given neither of us had so much as a clue, a seed was planted. We chatted about some we recalled…perhaps…vaguely…at least four or five. Maybe more…eight?...

Today we’re looking at the former “Pool” grain elevator in little Coleville Saskatchewan. It’s not really an old one compared to many we’ve documented, but it’s still a part of history. We’ve visited it twice, first during a prairie downpour some ten years back and again more recently while shooting...

A huge number of railway branchlines were built across the Western Canadian Prairies in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Crazy as it seems, they planned even more and this includes the proposed line spoken of here. It was to run north from Empress Alberta and while considered...