Off the Beaten Path with Chris & Connie

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...

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,...

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....

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...

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...

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...