It was once one of the most popular roadside attractions in the entire province of Alberta but today it is a mostly forgotten piece of local history. This is an overview of how the small town of Nanton, Alberta capitalized on some fine-tasting water and turned itself into a “must stop” destination on Highway 2.
It took me some time to get around to editing and posting the second half of the 2020 Alberta Ghost Town Tour, but here it is.
Now, let me head off a minor controversy which reared its head in the YouTube comments on the Part I video. I realize and understand that many of the places we visited on this tour are not “ghost towns” in the classic sense. I had a viewer comment about how the town of Carmangay has a population of 300 people and therefore not a ghost town. As I have said before, I tend to use a fairly broad definition of ghost town — one where any town which has seen a population decline or the closure of many businesses and services over the decades is a “ghost” of its former self. “Ghost town” is not intended to be a pejorative term — given the content of our blog and channel it is used by use as a term of endearment.
With the Fall upon us it remains to be seen what our next adventure will be. We took a week off for some downtime to do some camping, Geocaching, and hiking and used that as a break from creating video content too. While I greatly enjoy making videos, sometimes it is nice to just enjoy your surroundings and not worry about how to get a certain shot or how you’re going to splice things together at the end to form a somewhat cohesive story. I don’t want video to become a chore, especially because we make literally zero income from this endeavor.
Thanks for watching!
A few weeks back I mentioned we visited Rowley with journalists Johnnie Bachusky and Vincent Bonnay. I occurred to me that I never shared Vincent’s final outcome of his web series on Alberta ghost towns.
Here it is!
“The hidden lives of ghost towns: Across the Prairies, towns are disappearing. Some teeter on the brink of oblivion, the last gasps of their stories captured by roving groups of dedicated photographers and amateur historians. Others cling to life through whatever means they can. But there’s much more to all of them than just the ruins of old buildings. Here, we take a tour of three of Alberta’s ghost towns, before they fade into history.” — Vincent Bonnay, 2020
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/the-hidden-lives-of-albertas-ghost-towns
