Crowsnest Pass - Day One

Early on the morning of Friday May 31st, I set out with a couple of my friends from the Monochrome Guild.  I had two days booked off from work [Friday and Monday} and we had a vacation home rented for the weekend, down in Coleman.  Nigel and Court were traveling with me that morning, and later in the evening we would meet up with Arturo.  We are involved in a historical documentary project and will be photographing the remains of the coal mining industry in the province of Alberta.  This is a small project being undertaken by some of the members of the Monochrome Guild.  Other Guild members are involved in other projects.  Our friend Mark is also involved in this project, but he was unable to join us for the weekend.

There are several large forest fires burning in northern Alberta.  The largest is the Chuckegg fire burning up near High Level.  Smoke from that fire has drifted as far south and east as Montana, the Dakotas, and Wyoming.  Heavy smoke rolled into Edmonton on the afternoon of May 29th and by the time we hit the road on the 31st, it had covered the entire province.  It was very heavy all the way down to southern Alberta and Crowsnest Pass.  When we arrived at our destination, just after lunch, the smoke was so thick that we couldn't even see the mountains.
We stopped briefly at the Leitch Collieries Historic site, at the east end of Crowsnest Pass.  The remains of some old mining building are preserved here.  Mostly we stopped to review some of the interpretive information and get a feel for the history of the Pass.

Our next stop was in Hillcrest.  In 1914 there was an underground explosion in the Hillcrest Mine that killed nearly 200 miners.  It is the largest mine disaster ever to have occurred in Canada.  I found it somewhat ironic that it is within site of the largest rock-slide ever to have occurred in Canada.  The Frank Slide occurred about a decade earlier and but for the smoke would have been visible above Hillcrest.  We spent some time in the cemetery photographing the graves from the disaster.  There were a couple of mass graves in which most of the miners were laid to rest.  I'm not sure if these were all marked initially, but if not, they have been in recent years.  Most of the graves are now fitted with headstones or nameplates.

Later in the afternoon we stopped at the Monarch Tipple in Bellevue and photographed the ruin of this structure.  It has deteriorated somewhat and been tagged with a lot of new graffiti since my last visit in 2016.

Once we finished up shooting in Bellevue we headed west up the valley to Coleman.  To our disappointment the main street in Coleman was barricaded and dug up for some utility work.  This prevented us from being able to photograph any of the old buildings in town.  By early evening we headed up to our rental house in Coleman and checked in.  We unpacked our gear and settled in, but not without a little adventure.  The breeze swung the locking interior door shut on us, and we had left the only set of keys and our cell phones inside.  But, this interior door had the butt hinges exposed and we were able to pull the hinge pins and get in.  We were a lot more careful about the keys after that little incident.

My friends Chris and Connie from Calgary were also out for the weekend.  We were calling upon their expertise and knowledge of the area to assist with our project.  Chris and Connie write the bigdoer.com website and I have been out with them many times in the past.  We all went out for dinner together in town before settling down for a nice visit after that.  Arturo arrived later in the evening and we connected with him, and his wife Sharon, for a little while before calling it a day.