Ghost Town Mountain Park Alberta Canada -Knight Light Photography

Ghost Town Mountain Park Alberta Canada

Getting to Mountain Park Alberta, especially from Calgary is no easy task. The last half an hour or so of the drive, on Highway 40, is a dirt road along side a sudden drop, not quite a cliff, but far enough where we’re parallel with old style power lines. The road itself is more like a scoop out of the mountain and flattened overtime by the few who feel gutsy enough to travel it. Taking all that into consideration, and add the fact that my wife and I do this in a Nissan Versa.
There are many signs that say “Enter at your own risk” and “Yield to oncoming traffic.” Oh and did I mention “Discharge of firearms strictly prohibited.”

Some big corporation is stripping the mountainside of coal, and there are many other signs, warning people not to trespass (off the roadway, like that’s possible). Employees seem to still be working, as massive dump trucks carry whatever it is they carry. This takes place about 30 feet up the other side. These machines, no less than the size of a house, kick up dirt, reducing our line of sight, and sometimes it looks as though they’re coming right for us, even though they’re a hundred feet away and to the side. All these factors will play with our sense of depth perception.

Mountain Park is a true ghost town. Unlike some of the other locations I’ve been to in the passing months, this place is almost completely isolated. All that remains is a cemetary, some old tracks, and of course, the breathe taking view.

Coal is the reason Mountain Park came into being, when American explorers John and Mary Gregg discovered it in 1895. By 1911, tracks had been laid, and The Mountain Park Coal Company was established. At 6200 feet above sea level, Mountain Park boasted a population of 1,500, yet maintained a village like atmosphere and way of life. The booming coal mining town had many sporting and social events, not to mention churches, billiards, a library, a theatre, a hospital, a parlor and restaurants.

Prosperity continued up until the 1940’s, where natural tragedies, floods, and customers switching from coal to diesel brought the mining company to a close on June 19th, 1950.

Residents didn’t wait long to leave.

The town’s remaining structures were either torn down for scrap or vandalized.

Thanks to one man, by the name of Robert Bracko, a former resident and mine worker, came back in 1994 and erected a historical plaque, in honour or the mine, town and people…and in 1997 many of the former town residents, family members and friends, returned to restore the cemetery. It’s the highest elevated cemetery in Canada and British Commonwealth, and contained veterans of the First World War and regrettably, many infants and children.

Mountain Park, Alberta really proved to me that the juice was definitely worth the squeeze. Easily my favourite experience to date, even though little remained.