On Tuesday March 8th, with a couple days booked off work, I headed down to Calgary. My friend Court, a fellow member of the Monochrome Guild, was along with me for the ride. We arrived at the Leighton Art Centre just south of Calgary at about 10:00AM. Stephanie and the other girls at the gallery were just packing the last of the prints from my just completed Ag2 show into the crates. I understand that about 450 guests attended the gallery over the four week run of the show and during that time another 500 kids, on field trips from various schools in the Calgary area, also attended the show. Nothing sold, but at least my work was viewed by a wider audience.
Court gave me a hand to load the crates full of prints into the back of my truck and we were soon on our way down to Pincher Creek. Our first stop was the Lebel Mansion Gallery. The Ag2 exhibition will be shown here through the months of April and May and I had made arrangements to drop off the crates in advance of the show. We off-loaded the three crates full of prints, carried them up the big flight of stairs into the mansion, and stored them away in a closet. I really appreciate the fact that the curator allowed me to drop off early as it saved me an extra trip down to southern Alberta. With the business part of the trip out of the way, Court and I made a quick stop for lunch. Refreshed, we headed west into the Crowsnest Pass.
It was cool and windy and not the most pleasant day. We decided to scout around for a while and see what we could find. We were staying for a couple of nights in Pincher Creek and would have a chance to do some shooting for a day and a half before we had to head back home to Edmonton. Our first stop was at the Leitch Collieries Historic Site. It was closed for the season and the gate to the parking lot was locked up. We parked in the driveway and wandered around for a little while.
After a brief walk around the site we jumped back into the truck and headed further west. We headed north out of the town of Frank, on some backroads, trying to find the Lille townsite. The crappy map that we had indicated that this ghost town was right beside the road. We later learned that it was a bit of a hike in to the old townsite. My friend Chris of the Bigdoer.com website later provided some information on what was left there, and how to get to it. On this particular day we didn't get that far, though we did find some sort of old foundation beside the road...
After this stop we headed further west still and soon found ourselves out on the shores of Crowsnest Lake, out near the Alberta - British Columbia border. We knew there was an old dance hall here and soon find it, nestled in the trees on the shore of the lake. We poked around here for a while and took a few snapshots.
The day was beginning to wind down by this point so we started making our way back towards Pincher Creek. There was an old industrial building up on the hillside, overlooking the Crowsnest River and the town of Coleman. We made our way up here and stopped and checked things out.
After this stop we continued further east and eventually ended up at Blairmore. Here there were more old, abandoned mine buildings. The sites were designated historic sites and were partially fenced. But the gate was standing open, and in another area the fence had been cut. We wandered in and explored here for a while as well. We ran into another photographer near one of the mine entrances. He was from Calgary and his name was Royce Howland. He was shooting with a digital medium format camera. He is a serious fine art photographer and conducts workshops and has a website called vividaspect.com. We chatted with him for a while and wandered about making a few more snapshots.
By this time the light was starting to fade, and the day was drawing to a close. It was still pretty cool and chilly, but the wind was starting to die down. My big camera never made it out of the truck on this day and the entire afternoon was spent just scouting around and taking a few snapshots. But, we had the entire next day at our disposal, and now had a pretty good lay of the land. We headed back to Pincher Creek and settled down at our hotel. We wandered over to a nearby restaurant for supper and then retired back to our room. Court brought along a nice bottle of Irish Whiskey and we made sure to give it a good test drive. We turned in relatively early, anxious to get after some more serious photography the next morning.
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