Category: Exploring History

Miner's Cottage

In the Pipeline…

Coming soon to BIGDoer.com! Here’s some new stuff we’ve been working on, a sampling of what’s in the pipeline, places documented over the last number of months that will be posted here soon enough. We’re itching to show you! Included are abandoned things, old farms and ranches, some of them...

Loverna Saskatchewan Ghost Town

Forgotten Prairie: Loverna

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,...

Stone Dug Out Building

GBB Ranch

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...

Old Church Hoosier Saskatchewan

Forgotten Prairie: Hoosier Saskatchewan

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....

Closed Roadhouse Alberta

The Roadhouse

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...

Canmore Engine Bridge

Canmore “Engine” Bridge

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...

Woo Sam's Buffalo Alberta

Woo Sam’s

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...

The Queenstown Garage

Queenstown Garage

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,...

De Winton Grain Elevator

Grain Elevators of DeWinton

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...

Barn Wood Thieves

Eastern Alberta Abandonment

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...

Rowley Alberta Train Station

Random Rowley

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...

Parish Hall Kopernick Church

Kopernick

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...

Robert Pohl Photographer

These Stone Walls

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...

Wood Grain Elevator Ogilvie Mills

The Last Wood Ogilvie

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...

Shandro Pioneer Historic Village

Shandro Historic Village (Closed)

This post is from 2017, and shot the year before, but with fall 2024 updates. It was never a town to speak of, more a locality or a dot on the map reference point for the general area. So not an incorporated community (for Barb Foran: one lacking a municipal...

Old Store Viking Museum

Museum Tour: Viking Alberta

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...

Canada Centennial Drone View

Some random hillside…

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...

Rails to Tales Stettler

Coming Attractions!

To say we have a “couple” articles in the works would be a gross understatement. We’ve been busy exploring and photographing all over the west, at some crazy accelerated pace, Chris & Connie seemingly possessed or something and accumulating a huge number of photos and information for new posts. We’re...

Abandoned Motorcycle Track

Valley Motorcycle Park

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...

Abandoned Farm Kitchen

Stops Along the Way…

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...

Central Western Ballast Car

Starland Alberta

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...

Cowboy Bunkhouse

The Stock Association

Deep in the depths of winter, on our visit, there’s peace and quiet here. The barn and horse corrals are empty. The bunkhouse, the cookhouse, it’s similarly so. Everything’s in place, ready for use, but there’s no one about except us. The silence, the stillness is palpable. Soon on however,...

Abandoned Barn

Forgotten Homestead

This adventure has us motoring down a lonely back road, one that seemingly goes nowhere. It runs arrow straight, the car raising a cloud of dust as it cuts across the great plains of Alberta, past endless fields of stubble. Then dipping into a low valley it twists and turns....

Abandoned Industrial Turbine

Chemical Plant

It’s happened again. It happens all too often these days. We’ve given the okay to go inside some abandoned place and document it but with one one big stipulation. That is, we speak of it vaguely, making doubly sure we don’t give anything away in the photos or text that...

Old Home Calgary Downtown

Seven Houses…and holding

Here’s instalment number four, where we put feet to pavement and document all the houses left in Calgary’s downtown core. Yes, I said houses, so single family dwellings, or ones that were formerly so but perhaps re-purposed, not in outlying neighbourhoods, but in the very centre of the city. The...

Buffalo Slope Elevator

Grain Elevators of Magrath

The small community of Magrath Alberta is home to a nice and varied collection grain elevators from various eras. There’s four here, down over there where the tracks used to be. A couple are traditional wood “prairie sentinels”, one’s a fairly modern, albeit modest sized, concrete silo type elevator. And...

St Nicholas Ukrainian Church

St Nicholas

Saint Nicholas, a devout religious figure from the early days of Christianity, and to many today, the face of everyone’s most favourite holiday ever, Christmas. Said to be a miracle worker, benevolent, a helper of the poor, advocate of the hopeless, the destitute, the damned, his life’s work was in...

High River Alberta Beachwood Estates

Beachwood Estates

The community of Beachwood Estates, High River Alberta, is doomed. It has been for a while. Once vibrant and full of life, the place is now empty, every last soul forced to move away. The boulevards are quiet, the dwellings quiet, nothing but total silence and come nightfall, total darkness....

1940s Chevy Pickup

Buffaloed

Once a subject is photographed and the images processed, we enter the research phase. This can take no time at all or it can be a long, painful, drawn out process. For most gigs it falls somewhere between the two. Regardless, budget constraints means we often can’t commit to more...

Pincher Station Alberta

A Few Minutes in Pincher Station

We’re in Pincher Station Alberta, passing through, heading west for a couple days of rest and relaxation. Timing is everything, and as it happens, we’re here and so is a train. Pull over, brakes on hard, jump out and run around like someone who’s mistakenly kicked a hornet’s nest. Catch...

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