The Ghost Town Bug
I’m a sneaky Mom. Michael needs to read more. By reading, I mean books – you know, those things with paper pages. He used to read a fair bit, but lately other than classroom reading, it’s dropped off. So I bought him a couple of new books. One is about thirteen "lost mine" legends. All of these mines are located in BC, and he was already interested in ghost towns so it wasn’t hard to get him to crack it open. The other book is about rock and gem hunting in places which are also in southwestern BC. Now he’s got a list of places he wants to go to. Mainly because he wants to find the lost treasures (along with a kazillion other people who know about the legends), but also because he truly likes to visit historic places. I’m fine with that because he willingly goes to very out of the way locations where I can shoot an abundance of photos. If the weather co-operates next weekend, we’ll be doing a small loop which will most likely take us all day. Especially as it can take us six hours to do a two hour drive due to diversions and things to photograph. I might even have to pick up another back-up battery for my camera lol. There will be loads to shot along the route we’ve planned, from the regular land & waterscapes that I shoot, to old buildings, remains of buildings, monuments and cemetaries. I hope that the weather is good, because Mike really wants to go. Barring that, I guess we can go looking for a place across the river from us where there was some kind of murder over treasure. It’s probably a subdivision now, but hopefully it’s up in the park area and undeveloped. Hard to tell by comparing the old map in the book with a current map, but I guess we’ll see what we can find.
Today’s excursion was very productive photo-wise. Mike even learned a few things when we stopped at the Hope Slide Observation Area to read the information and shoot a few pictures. I think he was a little overwhelmed by the size of the slide, the damage it did, and the fact that two of the four people who were killed in the slide were never recovered and are still buried somewhere in the 47 million cubic metres of rock, dirt and trees which covered the valley. The mountain which partially collapsed is also the site of two plane crashes which occurred in the mid-1960’s, one not long after the slide. One of the planes was military, and there were two Remembrance Day wreaths laid at the foot of the slide memorial monument. They’ve been there at least 11 months, so it was refreshing to see that people in general had enough respect to leave the wreaths in place and not steal or destroy them. Perhaps there is some hope for humanity after all.