![]() I guided by car down the steep trail, parked in a small clearing, and got out to do some snooping. The sign read “FISHERVILLE HISTORIC TRAIL” and included a picture of a finger pointing down a narrow trail leading into the woods. Sure enough, about twenty seconds down the road, I saw a stock paper sign nailed to a tree on the left hand side of the road. I did as the prospector suggested and headed back down the one-way trail, barely managing to get my vehicle back up the steep embankment. Just head back along the road you just came up and look for the sign on your left.” You can still see some of the old graves. “Don’t you know what this place is? This place used to be a boomtown. “Yep.” The prospector looked up at me in surprise. “Very cool,” I said, suppressing a shudder at my involuntary reaction. “That’s fifty, sixty bucks, right there.”įor an instant, a primal flicker of jealously rippled through me- a startling and unexpected sensation which whispered of the power of the yellow metal that had driven conquistadors through the jungle and Stampeders to the arctic in centuries past. “See that?” He pointed to a cluster of tiny glittering gold nuggets that stood out from the surrounding sediment. “Here, I’ll show you,” he said, producing a quantity of sand from a container. He told me that he was panning for gold, and that he’d already had some luck that morning. ![]() The guy, who was dressed in knee-high rubber boots and waterproof coveralls, must have been a few years older than I was. The man waved to me, and I got out of my vehicle and walked over to say hello. As I drove onto the rocky beach and prepared to turn around, I spied, to my astonishment, a man standing knee deep in the Wild Horse River, leaning forward with a pan in his hand. Wild Horse Creek.Īfter driving for what seemed like an eternity, I came to a ‘turnoff’ which was really nothing more than an eroded bank leading down to the Wildhorse River. I drove on and on into the mountains, praying that I wouldn’t run into another vehicle bound for Fort Steele. This dirt road (which, in retrospect, must have been the Fort Steele-Wildhorse Road) was a bit of a one-way trail, and I had little choice but to follow it until it widened sufficiently to allow me to turn my car around. Near a gas station graced by one of those goofy cutout board inviting passersby to transplant their faces onto the vacant countenance of a faceless prospector, I ended up taking a wrong turn and heading up a narrow and somewhat precarious logging road which runs along a cliff overhanging the Wild Horse River. A bridge over Wild Horse Creek.Īfter enjoying the sights and sounds of Fort Steele, I set out to get a photo of the confluence of the Kootenay and Wild Horse Rivers, where an old CPR railway station once stood. Today, visitors to Fort Steele can walk down the raised wooden sidewalks past horse drawn carriages, a steam engine locomotive, and actors dressed in period costume who appear baffled by the size of your tiny camera.įort Steele, British Columbia. Although the original settlement dwindled into a ghost town in the early 1900s, a true-to-life replica of the frontier community was built in the late 1960s and opened to the public as the Fort Steele Heritage Town, a living museum designed to imitate Fort Steele as it appeared in the 19 th Century. ![]() The settlement acquired its new name in 1888, when the famous Mountie Sam Steele came to town to settle a contentious dispute between a local prospector and a Kootenai Indian whom he accused of murder (Fort Steele was never a ‘fort’ in the truest sense of the term, although it did house a NWMP outpost). Sam Steele.įort Steele was once a town called Galbraith’s Ferry, established in 1864 by a ferry operator named John Galbraith, who made his living transporting prospectors across the Kootenay River. About halfway through my trip, I decided to pay a visit to Fort Steele, a living history museum just up the B.C. ![]() That summer, I took a week-long solo road trip through the Canadian Rockies, in part for the purpose of acquiring photos for my own website. I’m going to tell you a story about a little adventure I had in the summer of 2014, which led to my accidental discovery of a ghost town in the wilderness of southern British Columbia. ![]()
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