Not denigrating the efforts of the people of the tiny villages of Blairmore and Coleman, substantial help was a long way away. It was re-christened the Frank Military Hospital and Doctors Ritchie and A.H. Baker came to administer to the sick. At the moment the morning shift of 237 men was hard at work underground; only 48 would return alive to their families. This was the first application of a diesel engine underground in Canada. It is overgrown in places, the 23 trestles are gone, and its steep; the pair of old 2-6-0 Moguls that the F&GM owned could only drag three loaded boxcars at a time up the two and three percent grades. According to users from AllTrails.com, the best place to hike in Crowsnest Provincial Park is Crowsnest Ridge via Phillips Pass Road, which has a 4.3 star rating from 116 reviews. An aspect of Franks history that is often over-looked amid the rubble of its famous Slide is that it was, reputedly, the first town in the Pass to raise a miners co-operative store. Ottawa maintained a customs post in the Town, and an army barracks, and Alberta Government Telephones built its regional switching station and opened an exchange. In gratitude to the Minister of Railways, A.G. Blair, for involving Federal money in the construction of the CNL, and to honour Mr. More, the Lines divisional superintendent, on November 15, 1899, the residents named their hamlet Blairmore. Sixteen days later, on December 1st, the settlement was officially recognized when the Post Office contracted Lyon to open a local bureau in his store and appointed him post master.13 C-AC&C never regained the profitability it had enjoyed before the Slide. The coal was trucked the 20 miles or so to the plant at Coleman. Ash is structurally weak, and coke with too much ash tends to collapse when fired in a heap with metallic ore in the smelter, smothering the process. Besides, even though Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt and son Elliott Torrance Galt, directors of the AR&C, were tight with the Conservative party then ensconced on the federal seat of power, the opinion in Ottawa was that such a nationally important project as a railway to the raw wealth of southern British Columbia should not be left to what was, after all, a small company. McGillivray Creek Coal and Coke Company and Coleman maturing, Incorporated in the State of Washington in 1909 with $3 millions in capitalization and the capable Lorne Argyle Campbell, the vice-president and general manager of the CPRs West Kootenay Power & Light, as president, the McGillivray Creek Coal and Coke Company (MCC) was formed to purchase nearly 2,000 acres of coal leases just to the north of Coleman, under the eastern slopes of Iron Ridge, an extension of the Dennison measures. In 1995 the School Foundation of the Nippon Institute of Technology bought the structure and modified it for use as both a retreat for male Tokyo tech program students and their guests, and, in conjunction with Lethbridge Community College, as an English-immersion facility which interacts with Pass society through joint technical projects and community services. The mine could be productive for decades. Around 1970 the company built a new washery at Coleman. This line was built primarily to access mineral-rich southeastern BC via an all-Canadian rail route, and to assert Canadian (and CPR) sovereignty in an area that U.S. railroads were beginning to build into. It then becomes a freeway named Crowsnest Trail as it reaches Highway25 which branches north to Picture Butte while University Drive runs south to the University of Lethbridge as the main thoroughfare through West Lethbridge. The mining plan was simple: drift two adits horizontally into the seam. Some of the backers got cold feet and on June 7th, 1921, Bellevue Collieries liquidated itself, its assets immediately being transferred to Mohawk Bituminous Collieries which had been organized specifically to receive them by some of Bellevue Collieries original principals. This is the south-western extremity of the Hudson Bay drainage basinRuperts Landand the cold spring-waters up-welling from a cave beneath the Ridge to create this triumvirate of lakes is on its way to the North Atlantic. In the Trough, with its tortuously contorted rock strata, promising seams could suddenly disappear at a faultdid the seam move up or down relative to the mine, and how far? McEachern School was opened in September of 1962, when it became the communitys Maple View Hall. Smith in charge. The route winds its way at a moderate grade until the last section that kicks up to 7.4%. The suggestion made sense: the companies were working the same seams, were in close proximity to each other, and were both suffering drastically reduced sales. Few of the hamlets buildings had, fortunately, been caught by the Turtles onslaught. An agreement was struck and on December 4th of 1951 which saw Coleman Collieries, Limited, (CCL) incorporated under the Alberta Companies Act with a 1.21 million dollar capitalization in $1.00 shares, the majority of which were bought up by CPs Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company. The highway meets the northern end of Highway 4 at the eastern limit of Lethbridge before continuing east to Coaldale and Taber. Under the auspices of the Ecomuseum Trust the building was declared a Provincial Historic Site on July 6th, 1993, and restoration was completed. In the late 1970s CCL began to loose its Japanese markets to Kaiser Resources in the west Pass. In 1961 the Mine was closed and the tipple removed in 1962. The cadre of Movers and Shakers who had tried to incorporate the community in 1912 had not succeeded in interesting many of their 500 fellow residents in the proposition; now it was evident that Passburg would never join the league of legitimate settlements. In 1952 H-MC joined Coleman Collieries, Limited (CCL), a consortium of Pass coal companies controlled by CPs Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company, Limited, (CM&S) and began delivering Tents bounty to the consortiums new washery and tipple in Coleman. Rocky Mountain reached what was to be its peak production year in 1913 only to become a casualty of the credit crunch which crippled Canadian business prior to World War One. Exactly eleven months later, suspecting that the Forces war-depleted staff couldnt be relied upon to whole-heartedly enforce the provinces new liquor prohibition law, Alberta cancelled the Mounties contract to police the country-side, restricting the their mandate to federal laws only. Frank, Leaving Blairmore, 20th Avenue rolls east past the Courthouse, crosses the River on a concrete decked bridge and rejoins the Crowsnest Highway at the base of Bluff Mountain, also known as Goat Mountain for those evolved antelopes which at one time populated its slopes. Despite the fact that the moderate MWUC soon re-exerted its influence over the workers of the east Pass, the strike had set in motion a chain of events which resulted in the election of a workers slate to the town council and school board of Red Blairmore in February of 1933. *Don't provide personal information . No small task it was. Old photos reveal that this end of town looked nothing like the begrimed hell of Michel or Natal; the homes appeared bright and metallic surfaces reflect light back at the lens. In 1877 the Lieutenant-Governor of Canadas North-West Territories, David Laird, signed a treaty with the Blackfoot Confederacy by which the latter transferred to Canadian jurisdiction some 35,000 square miles of Prairie which the Tribe had long held as their hunting grounds. Writes John Kinnear Crowsnest and Its PeopleMillennium Edition, Pass-wide some 1400 workers walked out. For the vast majority of people here, many being recent immigrants from countries where wine shared with friends and family over dinner is a cornerstone of civilization, a hot, dangerous day of hacking coal from the back of a black cave could laudably be rewarded with a whiskey and a beer in the sociable atmosphere of a local taverna. Once in a while a more unified action would occur which saw the entire workforce walk out of a companys mines. Across the Highway from the settlements access road is a large Travel Alberta outpost chock full of maps and pamphlets. Thank you very much. crowsnest highway elevation profilehow old is junior afolabi salokun. Informed that his son had been shot, the Emperor picked up Filumena Florence Lassandro, the 22-year old wife of a business partner, Carlo Lassandro, and booted it up to Coleman to confront Lawson. But for the single line of trackage arrowing down the middle of the right-of-way and the gazebo, the site is now cleared of everything but its coal-stained ballast. Across the River from the Playgrounds, on the slopes of Bluff above the site of the zoo, was an area which became known as Hill Sixty. So named for a feature on a WWI battlefield in France, it was the location of the infamous brick house. A den of iniquity to some, a pleasure palace to others, the house was early on owned by the notorious Emperor Pic, the rum-running town councillor of Blairmore. Tourism based on the natural and historical resources of the area remains underdeveloped but is slowly growing. 1908: forest fire destroys Fernie (pop: 6000), which soon rebuilds. The electric railway was, as wags had long predicted, simply another air line, a pipedream. The building was dedicated on July 2nd, 1960, and was moved to its present location in 1984. Kerr in his introductory article in Crowsnest and its People (Crowsnest Pass Historical Society, Coleman, 1979), during the Mesozoic Period between 220 and 70 million years ago. The CPR esteemed it especially for use on passenger trains and bought all it could get. Rankling also was the promise that inspectors would be poking around making sure safe procedures were followed, especially trenched blasting and the amount of unproductive work that that would entail. Hillcrest-Mohawk laboured on through WWII, drawing only a lucky few former Hillcrest employees across the valley of the Crowsnest to mine the Mohawk of work in the surface plant. On the lot east of the office Pozzi raised the unique H-shaped structure for WCC, and two years later built the old Greenhill Grill building, nearly an exact replica of the WCC block. Brrr. FCC carried on business until more fires underground and a mighty gas explosion levelled much of its surface plant in 1917. Extremely sensitive, the new sensor is continuously bouncing signals off the mountain and two large cracks that have been discovered on the South Peak. Crowsnest Pass (sometimes referred to as Crow's Nest Pass, French: col du Nid-de-Corbeau) is a low mountain pass across the Continental Divide of the Canadian Rockies on the AlbertaBritish Columbia border. Such an interference was the Great War. Until CP hacked its roadbed into the latters edge late in 1897 and the Alberta Department of Public Works bull-dozed the proto-No. A solitary red-necked grebe hunts, cutting ripples into the glassine waters upon which shimmering light paints perfect reflections of the green-weathered limestone Mountains. Farthest west, the Highways former alignment now calls itself 21st Avenue and branches off northward, weaves itself up among the boulders to mount the bench and roll along its lip past houses and cottages towards the downtown. This land belonged to the CPR, and here, during minings hey-day, the Railway maintained a menagerie of freight-sheds and shops flanking its station. Though the markets were soft, the company was nearing its goal of mining 2,000 tons per day. In 1892, alarmed that the rich ores of B.C.s Kootenay and Boundary districts were leaking away into the United States at an ever increasing rate, CP announced to its shareholders that management was seriously considering building a line through the Crows Nest Pass. Chas. Most of that income, 85% in Internationals case, had been derived from the CPR, while CM&S itself had taken 12% of Internationals output. It tended to ignite undetected pockets of methane gas which frequently leaked from the seams and pooled on the mine floor. Ending the phalanx of signs on the south side of the Avenue is the beautifully belled Gambrel roof of the two-story Greenhill Hotel. In 1959, citizens rehabilitated the Hillcrest Cemetery which had become a wild forest glade, and today a dignified cairn has replaced the humble wooden head markers that were originally used to record the names of the dead. Labour problems could disrupt production or transportation break-downs could interrupt deliveries. Aldridge, the manager of the CPRs smelter at Trail, B.C., Lewis Stockett of CPs Natural Resources Department in Calgary stated that for that year the Hillcrest operation output 122,966 tons at a cost of $1.31 per ton. Along the northern edge of what was likely the Railways construction tote rode building lots were staked and sold madly to merchants eager for frontage on the bustling rail yards. Fernau contracted the Italian-trained architect E.J. School classes were quickly moved there from the pool hall. Soon every mine in the East pass was affected as entire families attended demonstrations to protest their rapidly degenerating conditions. Kozma in their Canadian Pacifics Western Depots: The Country Stations of Western Canada (South Platte Press, David City, NE, 1993), in 1986, and the rest of the structures demolished. To the south of the Highway is the sullen concrete-faced Phillips Cable, Limited, building, officially opened on May 1st of 1965, part of an economic diversification plan to bring work to the Trough. With the end of the war came recession and the subsequent closure of the B.C smelters which had bought so much coal and coke. For the emerging miners it must have been a scene almost incomprehensible. The survivors were in serious trouble. A third fire on November 21, 1922, took the new hospital that Dr. Norman Beeman had built in the five years since he had succeeded Dr. McKenzie. A swimming pool followed. The CPR sought and received construction funding from the federal government, partially in exchange for a freight subsidy on prairie farm exports and equipment imports which came to be called the "Crow's Nest Pass Agreement". At least 81 people died, the exact total remaining unknown because no-one knows exactly how many workers were in Poupoure and McVeighs construction camp on the flats by the rail linefive, reports the Cranbrook Herald of April 30th, including J. McVeighor how many guests might have been staying with the families in the lost eastern end of the hamlet. This seemingly sensible idea was rejected on the argument that the lamp didnt cast nearly the same amount of light as an open flame, and therefore made working in the absolute pitch-black darkness of a coal mine even more dangerous. A School Board had been organized, and in 1911 had been given permission to borrow $5,000 to raise a school building on a lot on the highside of Main Street just west from downtown, according to a map21 supplied to the author by Arend Visser in 2004. At $1.00 par value MCCs shares immediately attracted enough mainly Minneapolis-area buyers so that by the summer of 1910 the company had been able to raise a tipple over the CNL tracks for sorting, cleaning and loading coal, and was hauling it thereto from the mines mouth two miles away on a miniature electric railway. The property was owned by one J.C. Drewry. Still it was jamb-packed, and in 1924 the larger Maple Leaf School was erected in the neighbourhood of the same name, near Mohawks mine on what is now 28th Avenue. Rocky Mountain sold its works to the Canadian Cement Company, but the plant never re-opened and was scrapped out in 1939. With cash in pocket, the developer had to hire workers and shelter them close to the works to minimize unproductive travel time. As the companies were engaged in cut-throat competition amongst themselves, this front was not entirely successful. Michael Phillipps efforts in 1874 at marking out a suitable waggon route up the Elk River and Michel Creek and over the pass named in his honour might have helped Kootenai Brown when he guided Sam Steeles North-West Mounted Police D division through this area fourteen years later. In hopes of a recovery, the company maintained the Greenhill until 1963 when it allowed the depths to flood. After a year of joint operations the new company decided to concentrate its efforts on the Mohawk mine and on December 2nd of 1939,26 having salvaged everything worthwhile from the tunnels, the company blew the Hillcrests portals closed with enough explosive that the Mine hasnt heard a human footfall since. Leading the switch to oil were the railroads. At the foot of 131st Street, a squirrelly little suspension bridge marked Use at Own Risk takes folks onto the left bank of the Crowsnest to walk the waterside path along the much-straightened River and view the old Greenhill rail yards. 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