Off the Beaten Path with Chris & Connie - Est 2012

There were once many grain elevators in Crossfield Alberta, now there is but one. Standing fast against time and progress, the town’s very last “prairie sentinel” is also its newest, surviving as a private seed cleaning plant. It’s sits along side a busy rail line, as though waiting to load...

Our goal for this trip is the abandoned CPR railway bridge at Bullpound Alberta. Located in a remote section of the Red Deer River valley, far from any civilization, or even a road, getting there will require hiking in across empty featureless plains. Bullpound was nothing more than a nondescript...

The hamlet of Chancellor Alberta is tiny a dot on the map. It’s home to a handful of people, an interesting community hall and sitting alongside an abandoned railway branch line, an old grain elevator. The latter two structures will be the subject of this report. First up is the...

We called this the Wimborne farm, not because that’s the name of the people who lived here – we don’t know them, who they were or what’s their story. Rather, we simply call it this because it’s located near that small Alberta town. Like most abandoned farms we stumble across,...

Hanna Alberta was once a busy railway division point and the facility seen here, the old roundhouse and turntable, were used to service the steam locomotives that would work this section of line. This was an important place for the railway. Today the trains are gone, but the roundhouse remains....

For this adventure we explore the surface plant ruins of the Hosmer Mines Ltd. operation in (where else) Hosmer BC. While the mine only operated for a half dozen years, a lot remains of it, including several substantial concrete buildings and a long row of coke ovens. Clearly everything here...

In early August, Connie and I were out exploring a lonely section of Alberta, the dry belt region southeast of Hanna. It’s a forgotten and empty place with few inhabitants, ghost towns and seemingly more abandoned farms then those that are lived in. In other words, it’s the perfect playground...

It’s been many, many years…no…actually its been two decades since I last visited Moyie Falls near Cranbrook BC. I’ve been meaning to return and have made plans to do so many times over the years, but for one reason or another, something always got in the way that prevented this...

The grain elevator seen in this article is located at the Wilson Farm north of Drumheller Alberta, but once sat along the rail line in the town of Gartly, just to the north. Gartly is gone, the rail line is abandoned, but the elevator survives. Constructed in the late 1920s...

Three Hills Alberta has two standing grain elevators, a massive ex-Alberta Wheat Pool and an ancient ex-Parrish and Heimbecker. Standing directly across from each other, these two create a grain elevator canyon with the CNR’s north/south Alberta mainline passing right through the middle. Of the two, the AWP is in...

If you’ve driven highway 575 heading eastbound between Acme and Carbon, you have no doubt spotted the large train bridge spanning a deep and wide valley off to your right, at a point roughly halfway between those towns. This is the CNR’s Swalwell Bridge, a large concrete and steel structure...

Once upon a time it was a house, no it was a home, full of hopes, full of dreams, full of LIFE. Now there is nothing but lost memories and a wind that perhaps bears a ghostly resemblance to the noise of the family that once lived within. Here it...

Like almost every other town on the Canadian Prairies, Trochu Alberta was once home to many grain elevators. Today, all that left is a single survivor, a massive structure that looms over the half-vacant downtown core. Looking ready to load a line of rail cars it’s been many years since...

The four towns that are the subject of this report, Sheerness, Rose Lynn, Sunnynook and Carolside, are located in a remote corner of Alberta, far off any beaten path. Each lasted only a short while and in fact there is little to see today, but even so they still left...