Frank Slide

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Here's another set of old Canada photos, this time from the Frank Slide Interpretive Centre, at Crowsnest Pass in the Canadian Rockies. This spot was the site of the Frank Slide, an enormous 1903 landslide that buried parts of the coal mining town of Frank, including an estimated 70-90 residents.

I have to admit I was really creeped out by this place. I think in large part because the enormous rocky debris field is basically unchanged since that day in 1903. No moss grows on the rocks, no trees grow up in between them, no birds, no animals, nothing. It looks like it could have just happened days ago. History or no, I was happy to leave, and would've left even sooner if I'd been the one driving.

Olympic Park, Calgary

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Here are some old photos from the Olympic Park in Calgary, site of the 1988 Winter Olympics. Most of these photos are from the ski jump and bobsled track. These were taken just a few years after the Olympics, so I think the venues were more or less the same as they were for the games, other than the lack of athletes, spectators, and snow. The first photo in the slideshow is taken from the top of the ski jump run, looking down. I figured I'd lead with that one since it's a bit... dramatic. This ski jump run is the very spot where Eddie the Eagle (the semi-skilled British ski jumper) became a global punch line for a while. And the bobsled track is the one where the Jamaican bobsled team made its legendary Olympic debut. You're looking at history here, folks.

Alberta Legislature, Edmonton

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Here are a few old photos of the Alberta Legislature Building in Edmonton, circa 1990 or so. I was in college at the time and this may have been the last family vacation I went on with my parents & younger siblings. The main reason we'd gone to Edmonton was to visit the West Edmonton Mall, which was then the world's largest shopping mall. Everyone else was pretty excited about this, but I had the usual self-righteous college student disdain for malls and was bored silly, except for the water slide park, which was ok. Wikipedia says the mall is still the largest in North America, but only the tenth largest in the world, meaning there are no US malls in the top ten. I don't know about you, but I find that quite astonishing.

Anyway, we made a little side trip to go see the provincial capitol building, since we always had to go see state capitol buildings while traveling for some reason, and this was a logical extension of the idea. So we toured the building and wandered around the extensive grounds for a while. Despite being a PoliSci major at the time, it didn't occur to me to look into provincial politics and understand who was governing from this building. If I'd known the province was (and still is) run by right-wing whackaloons, with an official opposition of even crazier further-right whackaloons, it would have put a bit of a damper on the experience.

So the thing that intrigued me the most wasn't the building itself, which is your standard sorta-Roman, sorta-Gothic stately government building. What really drew my attention was a trio of odd concrete structures with mirrors at their tops, located in front of a legislative office building. I didn't realize what they were for until much later. Edmonton has an extensive network of pedestrian walkways, both underground and above ground, which was primarily built in the 1970s and early 80s, and these mirror towers are part of this network. The mirrors act as periscopes, reflecting sunlight through skylights into a pedestrian tunnel below ground. Several Canadian cities have systems like this, as do a few in the US, like the Skyway in Minneapolis, and underground tunnel systems in Houston, Dallas, and even Oklahoma City.

Portland has nothing like this system, and City Hall is aware of this and fully intends for it to stay that way. The idea is that pedestrian walkways above or below ground draw people away from street-level businesses, leaving the outdoors empty and sort of inhospitable. That's certainly been Edmonton's experience, such that the city council is now trying to figure out how to get people to go outside. Our weather is nowhere near as extreme as theirs, but dry indoor walkways would be awfully attractive during the long, cold, dark rainy months. People would use them constantly if they existed.