And, it is done. I have finally completed the video from the second day of the annual Alberta ghost town tour. While it seems the summer is moving so quickly this year, there are still plenty of explorations to come before the snow flies.
Hope you enjoy the video!
Each year since 2014, we get together with a group of friends and tour around the small towns and abandoned places in an area of Alberta for a weekend. This year our tour took us back to the area surrounding Drumheller and the Alberta badlands.
In previous years I would always consider this a photography trip, but my focus this year was less on the photos and more on video. Whether it’s a symptom of owning a drone or simply the desire to branch out into a new medium, I find myself becoming more interested in telling the story of the places we visit using video versus photos. Is it a phase or a new direction for DanOCan.com? I guess there’s only one way to find out.
So, I invite you to take a few minutes and join me on a video tour of our first day of the Alberta Ghost Town Tour, 2018 Edition.
I originally thought this post was going to be more video-based but I failed to capture enough footage to make any sort of compelling video. So, instead, it becomes another blog post with some photos.
We stumbled across this museum by accident. At least it was an accident in terms of planning on visiting it. We were driving through Camrose and saw the signs on the road and decided we should take a few minutes and visit. It was already getting late into the afternoon and we still needed to get home to release the dog before his bladder exploded.
The Camrose Heritage Railway Station and Park is run by the Canadian Northern Society. We are well aware of this group thanks to previous visits to Big Valley and Meeting Creek. In fact, the group was very accommodating to us and made a special effort to get someone to Meeting Creek to let us into the railway station there as part of the Central Alberta Museum Tour 2017. I’ll link to my YouTube videos of those places down below at the end of the post.
The main museum is housed inside the 1911 Canadian Northern Railway station. This is not the original location of the station, as it was originally located a bit east of the main town core but it was moved here in the early 1990s prior to becoming a museum.
The museum grounds also house the Morgan Garden Railway, a G-scale railway which contains models of a number of familiar sights, including the aforementioned Meeting Creek and Big Valley.
In addition, there are a number of smaller buildings on the grounds as well. These include a watchmen’s shed, which was originally a passenger shelter as well as a railway bunkhouse. Each building contains photos and artifacts which highlight the railway history of the area. Camrose was an important railway hub for the area, with both Canadian Northern and Canadian Pacific running lines into the town.
Back inside the main museum, there is the White Elephant Gift Shop which is stocked with various items donated by the community to the museum. Proceeds from the sales go to supporting the Society and their efforts. We bought a couple of small things.
I feel like this place deserves a far better write-up than I am giving them but, as I mentioned above, this was an unplanned stop and a brief visit. We’ll be sure to check them out again at some point when we have more time to do a proper visit.
This visit occurred on June 9, 2018.
Here are the links to my videos from Big Valley and Meeting Creek.
This post is more visual than wordy. Take a little trip with the DanOCan.com crew as we make our way up north to attend an event I’ve been trying to get to for several years.
For our next visit we’re going to move a little further north up Highway 21 from Ferintosh to the village of New Norway. New Norway has a population of less than 300 people but has a lot of interesting old buildings and was quite fun to drive around and explore.
New Norway achieved village status on May 31, 1910, although the post office bearing that name was established as early as 1903. The name was apparently in common use going back even earlier to 1895. There really isn’t a creative story behind the name. The Olstad family arrived in Wetaskiwin and purchased some homesteads south of that area. Many other families of Norwegian descent settled in the area with them and hence the name.
New Norway dropped from village to hamlet status in 2012.
The building which is most eye-catching is the Bethesda Lutheran Church. It was built in 1910 and the steeple stands tall above the town, rivaled only by the water tower. It was hard to get a nice shot of it because of all the power lines which ran through our shots.
One of the houses which appears to be unoccupied
The building has a beautiful mural painted on the front
Service stations of this vintage are always a favorite of mine
The Community Centre dates from 1939
Not much to say on this one. We were just passing through and grabbed some shots so we didn’t spend much time in the town. Neither of us had been here before so this was a bit of a voyage of discover for us. No goals other than see some things we had never seen before.
Date of visit: June 9, 2018
