Sleepy BELLEVUE is the first village worthy of the name after Fort
Macleod; an oddball and close-knit spot with an old-world feel unusual
in these parts. It's distinguished by a church the size of a dog kennel
and a wooden tepee painted lemon yellow, as well as the claim to have "the
best drinking water in Alberta". Nonetheless, it supports a small summer-only
infocentre by the campsite and provides visitors with the opportunity to
explore - complete with hard hat and miner's lamp - a wonderfully dark
and dank 100m or so of the old Bellevue Mine (30min tours every half-hour
mid-May to early Sept daily 10am-5.30pm; $6; tel 562-7388). The only
mine open to the public locally, it ceased production in 1962, but
remains infamous for an explosion in 1910 that destroyed the ventilator
fan. Thirty men died in the disaster, though not from the blast, but by
breathing so-called "afterdamp", a lethal mixture of carbon dioxide and
carbon monoxide left after fire has burnt oxygen from the atmosphere. As
if this wasn't enough, Canada's worst mining disaster ever had occurred
five years earlier at HILLCREST , a village immediately to the south of
Bellevue (signed from Hwy 3), when 189 men were killed by an explosion
and the effects of "afterdamp". All were buried together a few
centimetres apart in mass graves, now the Hillcrest Cemetery on 8th
Avenue.
Bellevue has a quaint campsite , the Bellecrest Community Association
Campground (tel 564-4696; donation), located just off the highway just
east of the village: it's open May to October and has 22 "random" sites,
toilets, tap water and an on-site ten-seat church with recorded sermons.
The site is also handy for the Leitch Collieries Provincial Historic
Site , just off the main road to the north before the campsite. This was
once the region's largest mining and coking concern; it was also the
first to close (in 1915). Today there's little to see in the way of old
buildings, but displays and boardwalk interpretive trails past "listening
posts" fill you in on mining techniques. The overgrown site is also
enthusiastically described by interpretive staff (mid-May to mid-Sept
daily 10am-4pm; winter site unstaffed; $2; tel 562-7388).
The Crowsnest Pass trail of destruction, death and disaster continues
beyond Bellevue. Dominating the skyline behind the village are the crags
and vast rock fall of the Frank Slide , an enormous landslide that has
altered the contours of Turtle Mountain, once riddled with the galleries
of local mines. On April 29, 1903 an estimated 100 million tonnes of
rock on a front stretching for over 1km and 700m high trundled down the
mountain, burying 68 people and their houses in less than two minutes.
Amazingly none of the miners working locally were killed - they dug
themselves out after fourteen hours of toil. The morbidly interesting
Frank Slide Interpretive Centre , situated 1.5km off the highway about
1km north of the village, highlights European settlement in the area,
the coming of the Canadian Pacific Railway to Alberta and the technology,
attitudes and lives of local miners (daily: June to early Sept 9am-8pm;
early Sept to May 10am-5pm; $4; tel 562-7388). It's well worth wandering
around the site and slide area - there's a 1.5-kilometre trail or you
can walk up the ridge above the car park for good views and an idea of
the vast scale of the earth movement: no one to this day quite
understands the science of how boulders travelled so far from the main
slide (several kilometres in many cases). "Air lubrication" is the best
theory, a device by which the cascading rock compressed the air in front
of it, creating a hovercraft-like cushion of trapped air on which it "rode"
across the surface.
|
