Category: Exploring History

When was the last time you saw an independent computer shop? Bet it’s been a while. There used to be lots of them, busy places all, with seemingly one on every corner, but mostly they’ve gone the way of the dinosaur. It’s one tough racket and even the big chains...

The past four or five years now a group of friends get together and explore. This merry band whose domain is dusty backroads, spend some summer weekend in some corner of Alberta (sometimes venturing into Saskatchewan too) in search of abandoned and forgotten stuff. Lots of cool things are seen...

It’s a lonely forgotten place, this rural property. The ride in takes one down a long dusty backroad, then a muddy cart track all squishy and rutted up, and finally cross country through pasture and field. Regular cars are unlikely to survive the journey. Arrive, stand and look around. In...

You’ve probably heard us speak of the film Forgotten Prairie. A number of posts we’ve published over the last few months have touched on it to one degree or another. Now you’ll get to see it. Finally! A production of Rueben Tschetter’s Cache Project, it’s a fine little piece about...

Each and every day it’s within view of tens of thousands of passing motorists but I bet a lot of them pay it no mind. There, along side road set back a bit from the #1A, but easily seen from it, and a mere stone’s thrown from Calgary’s City Limits...

Where Highway Ten crosses the Red Deer, at a place called Cambria, turn and glance north for a second. Over there, upstream, not far away and super easy to see, giant hunks of concrete sitting there in the middle of the river. Strange monoliths these, the remains of two bridges,...

God, the weather was awful. The bone chilling cold, howling wind, freezing rain and driven snow, a miserable weekend in the making. Or so we thought. It’s April 2017 and we’re out exploring back roads of Alberta and Saskatchewan with a rag-tag group of friends, in these horrible conditions, taking...

This here fine spring day finds us in Mossleigh Alberta, a pint-sized town just a bit southeast of Calgary. There’s all kinds of railway themed stuff here and old grain elevators – this is what we’ve come for. Today, we’re here to act as a guide for a train buff...

Perhaps a year or so back Team BIGDoer was approached by Rueben Tschetter, a well respected film producer and videographer with Cache Productions, Red Deer Alberta. Seems he’d been watching some of what we were up to – exploring abandoned places and ghost towns and chronicling the experience – and...

A drive down a dusty back road finds us in Loverna Saskatchewan. We’ve arrived! The community is that close to earning the title of “ghost town” and wandering quiet streets, we pass empty buildings, some near collapse, vacant lots, forgotten churches and other scattered remnants of human habitation. The silence,...

At a bend in the creek, in a secluded little coulee, we find the remains of the GBB Ranch. There used to be a lot of structures here, a good sized house, numerous sheds, outbuildings and corrals and other stuff. Today, there’s a collapsed barn, a couple pieces of old...

On a frigid weekend, April 2017, Chris ‘n’ Connie roll into east-central Saskatchewan accompanied by friends. We’re here filming a documentary “Forgotten Prairie”, a production highlighting this crazy obsession we have with all things abandoned and old. This day’s stop is the tiny little (almost) ghost town of Hoosier Saskatchewan....

The Red Deer River Valley is one of the more stunning places you can visit in the province. Those awesome Alberta Badlands, a wondrous setting, geologically interesting, historically fascinating and of course visually mind blowing. It’s pure magic for the senses. And because of all these qualities, it can be...

They call it the Canmore “Engine” Bridge. Here in a thoroughly spectacular setting, it spans the mighty Bow River and while used by pedestrians and cyclists today, it used to support a railway line that once served Canmore’s coal mine. Yes, they mined that stuff here – and in fact...

There’s not much in Buffalo Alberta – never was. Today, there’s a few houses, one or two appearing empty. There’s a thoroughly modern community hall, but mostly the town is made up of vacant lots. And there’s the abandoned rail line just over there. As for businesses there’s one, the...

There’s countless places like Queenstown Alberta scattered across the Canadian Prairies, little farming communities once full of promise that today seem to be hanging on by a thread. Not ghost towns in the true sense, they’re something close. There’s life, but it’s not always obvious. Imagine it. Streets to nowhere,...

When speaking of DeWinton Alberta, the cliched phrase “blink and you’ll miss it” comes to mind. A stone’s throw from metro Calgary, it’s just a tiny speck on the map. Well hidden in a small valley and only accessible via a winding back road, consequently not many people have heard...

On more than a few occasions we’ve been accused of being, ahem, a little “long winded”. We hear it all the time in fact…”more pics, less words”, or some such thing. Most say it nice and gently and we can accept that, even if at a personal level we don’t...

We’ve been to Rowley Alberta before. Many times in fact. An “almost” ghost town, full of history, photogenic as heck, tiny and just a few blocks square, it’s populated by a mere handful of residents. Not forgotten or dilapidated even though most buildings are empty, it’s all kept up to...

The road in is gravel, dry ‘n’ dusty. Same as all in the area. And all are similarly devoid of traffic. Stop, roll down the window and you’ll be greeted with silence. The location here is rural, well away from any town. Look all around…nothing to see but fields and...

These are the words oftentimes heard when describing long forgotten places…”if these walls could talk”. It’s a catch all phrase really, some might say an overused one at that, when one’s thought are overwhelmed – “this empty old farm house…if these walls could talk”. Still, more often than not, it...

Wrentham Alberta, a teenie-weenie little village, the term “metropolis” never once used to describe it. In the far south of the province it was founded around a century ago when the railway arrived. The population, well, it’s a mere handful, hearty folks all, as people who dwell in these small...

It was never a town to speak of, more a locality, some crossroad, a dot on the map, a reference point for a general area. There might have been a post office here, perhaps a rural school close by, maybe a church or two, but not an organized community in...

Nothing beats a good small town museum. Team BIGDoer is huge fan and think you should be too. They’re hidden gems, wonderful places to learn about local history, the people who came before, those tough and resilent folks from times past, on display at these venues the things connecting them...

This post should have been published last week. We meant to publish it last week. Really, honest to God we did. We started work on it, got about half way done, then something darn distracting stole us away for a couple working days. It’s only Chris & Connie holding down...

Flashback…it’s sometime in the latter half of the 1980s. It’s race day at Valley Motorcycle Park, an “MX” (motocross) track found in a shallow coulee on the Alberta Plains. It’s a busy event, groups of riders coming in from all over Calgary and area eager to challenge the track. The...

Seen here, odd bits and pieces, random stuff abandoned in nature found while out exploring Minburn and Two Hills Counties east of Edmonton. We’re there to documented some specific subjects and these were discovered travelling between them. There’s old farms, forgotten metal, empty buildings found on some street in a...

Starland Alberta. Not a town. Nothing more than a siding along a former rail line, the only thing here, a lone grain elevator. It’s relatively modern one, a bit unusual in some ways, which we’ll touch on soon enough. Think of it as a transitional design of sorts, from the...