Crowsnest Pass - Day Three

Day Three in Crowsnest Pass started out with a lot of promise.  We connected with Chris and Connie on the morning of Sunday June 2.  We were heading up to Crowsnest Lake, at the Alberta, British Columbia border.  Chris had been in contact with the owner of the old Power Generating Plant.  This was a huge brick building on the shores of the lake that once generated power for the area.  We had permission to go in and check it out.  I understood that the equipment in the building was long gone, and only the shell remained standing.  We parked on the road by the lake and walked in to the site.  The old roadway was disturbed by fresh tracks and activity.  We quickly relaized that the plant was gone... totally demolished, with nothing left but a small pile of rubble pushed into the bush.  We could not understand why the owner had given us permission to go in to a building that was no longer there....  Perhaps he was annoyed at being bothered about it...?  Or perhaps he misunderstood and thought we just wanted access to the property...?  Chris has never met the owner in person but we believe him to be quite elderly, so perhaps he is just a little confused...?  In any event our visit to the power plant was not to be, which put a real damper on the day.
We did stop at the old Dance Hall on the shore of Crowsnest Lake.  It is badly deteriorated and vandalized and is not particularly photogenic.  Some efforts have been made to brace it against its eventual collapse, but that was done several years ago, and no further attempts have been made at repair or restoration.

We headed back into the town of Coleman and attempted to access the remaining buildings at the coal handling site along the railway tracks.  The big tipple was torn down several years ago and I've never seen it except in pictures.  The remaining buildings included some maintenance shops, office building, wash house, coke ovens, etc.  Last time we were in the area in 2016 the site was unsecured and we were able to wander around.  This time the site was all fenced off and locked.  It seems a private enterprise purchased the facility.  It appears this was mostly for access to the Crowsnest River, which passes through the site as there are now campsites there, and these are all rented out to RV's.  The area around the old buildings seems to be mostly a storage compound for RV's and machinery.  Even if we could have gained access to the site, it was not very photogenic with all that clutter around.  We did attempt a few shots of the coke ovens before moving on.  

On a hill above town there is a shell of a building that Chris says was the power distribution building for the mine operations.  It looked more like a maintenance shop to me as there was a large overhead chain hoist and some floor pits in the building.  But I'll take Chris' word for it as he is very familiar with the area and has done a lot of research on the mining industry.  We photographed here for a while before moving on once again.

Chris knew of a secondary road that wound its way through the rubble at the base of the Frank Slide and that was our next stop.  We wandered around here for a bit and marvelled at the sheer mass of rock that had cascaded down off of the face of nearby Turtle Mountain, over a hundred years ago.  This was the largest rockslide in Canadian history and it remains largely unchanged from the time when it happened.  We photographed here for a bit and then moved on down the road to a place called Lime City.  Here there were the remains of some large kilns that processed the limestone from the Frank Slide rubble, into cement, mostly for making concrete.  A certain amount of the lime was also used as dust suppression in the coal mines.  By this point I was getting a little worn out from the heat and from dragging around my big camera all weekend.  I was also getting a bit red and sunburnt on my arms.  I retreated to the shade, and took a shot of the kilns, while the others wandered around a little more extensively.  This was our last stop of the day and once we finished up here we retreated back to the tavern at the Greenhill Hotel in Blairmore for another couple of fifteen dollar jugs of draft beer.

By this time it was late afternoon so we headed over to a nearby pizza place for dinner.  We all enjoyed one last visit together, and a big feed of pizza.  Once dinner was finished, Chris and Connie had to hit the road back to Calgary.  The rest of us were staying in the area for one more night.