The Scientist: Ghosting around town

I went down to Calgary for the long weekend. On Saturday, Garrett and I went on a tour of the eastern Alberta prairie region on a quest to complete his photography class assignment. His final assignment was to hand in 5 photographs that were related somehow, and he thought that it would be neat to take some shots of prairie ghost towns. We looked up the location of some Alberta ghost towns and found two that were fairly close to Calgary - Dorothy and Rowley. We jumped in his new X-trail (photos to come!) and headed into the fields!

Our first exciting find was an old shed on a small prairie highway. A lot of the old buildings on the highways are part of people's yards, so we couldn't really visit those, but this old shed was on its own beside the road. We pulled over and got out of the X-trail, excited to find not only an old shed and barn, but a classic car parked in the shed!

Garrett took some pictures and we continued on, making our general way to Drumheller and the canyonlands around there.

Dorothy was about half an hour east of Drumheller and was very very small. There were only two houses there that people probably still live in. We parked the car and walked around, taking a picture of the grain elevator there (I took this one).

There was another old car kicking around in Dorothy too. I took this picture and fiddled with it in PhotoShop so it looked cool.

Then Garrett went and took some nice, fancy camera pictures of the car and other sights in Dorothy.

Aside from the grain elevator and the old car, there was also an old church in Dorothy.

The townspeople had started to restore the roof of the church, so it had new wood shingles, but I think it still looks pretty neat despite that.

This is a picture of the door on the church. I love the texture that Garrett was able to pick up.

There was also another old building across from the church, which I'm guessing was a school house. We were able to go inside and wander around (well, as much as we could wander in a one-room building).

I was momentarily worried that the school house might not be structurally sound enough for us to go inside, but it was really quite fine. It had the old fashioned plaster walls, some of which was falling off. Pretty neat!

As we headed back along the highway from Dorothy, we also stopped at an old trestle bridge in East Coulee. Garrett took this shot before we headed into Drumheller to eat our picnic lunch:

Next, we continued North of Drumheller to the town of Rowley. Rowley was quite different from Dorothy because the townspeople there have put a lot of money into maintaining the old buildings and the main street. It's almost a little more cheesy, because it's maintained so well - there are also weird things like mannequins in the windows of some of the old stores that makes it cheesy. More people "live" in Rowley, too, although I think most of the residents just have those houses as summer cottages. We talked to some of the people there as we wandered around and took some pictures. Apparently they had just received a large grant to start fixing up their grain elevators, since the three elevators are one of the only set of three left in the province.