Road Trip

haggisjim
Jul 3, 2017
2 min read

Approximately a 40-minute drive on Eagle Butte Road, south of Dunmore, AB, lies St. Margaret's Church. Built in 1907, it was originally home to a Church of England congregation. After extensive renovation in 1992, it is now considered non-denominational. It also functioned, a couple of times, as a schoolhouse in the early 1940s...

Four prominent stained glass windows cast a pleasant diffused light on the congregants. This one features a bluebird -- a fairly common avian visitor to these parts of Southern Alberta...

A small graveyard lies just to the south of the church's main door. I was surprised by the number of people laid to rest here that I either knew or was familiar with...

Adjacent to the cemetery is a seemingly unused baseball diamond. These Gaillardia (Gaillardia aristata -- a.k.a. Great Blanket Flower) have taken up permanent residence at second base...

I noticed a Bluebird box on a cemetery fencepost and took a peek inside, where I found one very nervous Tree Swallow. I kept telling him (her?) it was okay; all I wanted was a picture. And this was the result...

At the end of another short jaunt, nearly straight west, one can find the quiet hamlet of Orion, AB. Established in 1916 it reached a population of 150 before drought conditions reversed the boom. Today only a handful of citizens remain, but the hamlet still sports a post office, grocery store and hardware store (albeit under the same roof). You can even purchase petrol from one of the rusting elevated tanks if your vehicle is running near empty. And although it was recently replaced with a new one, the building below once functioned as the local church (it also served for a time as a school)...