Categories: Travel

This abandoned ‘city’ is only two hours from Calgary

Photo via Wayfinding

The town of Bellevue, nestled in Alberta’s Crowsnest Pass, is a pretty unsettling place.

With the nearby Frank Slide that buried the town in 1903, this abandoned “city” is located just down the road from the rubble.

Lime City was erected to process the abundant amount of limestone leftover by the disaster. While it’s accessible by car, it sits at the end of a rural dirt road, and the vibe there is deeply unnerving.

Welcome to Lime City

Built in 1909 and located on the eastern edge of Frank Slide, these abandoned wood-fired drawn kilns are seriously creepy.

You’ll have to hunt a bit to find them, but if you head to 514 207th St. in Bellevue, you can’t miss the towering ruins of these massive kilns.

Entrepreneur Joe Little thought he struck gold when he realized that “Canada’s deadliest rockslide” also contained an abundance of limestone that was dropped onto the town when the nearby Turtle Mountain collapsed.

Without needing to quarry limestone, Little created an operation that broke boulders into manageable pieces before they were baked at high temperatures in the kilns.

This way of processing limestone might have been genius, if it weren’t for the rumours of ghosts who haunt the site at Frank Slide. They are said to wander there from the bodies that have never been uncovered from the rubble.

Ghostly rumours

The death toll at Frank Slide isn’t quite certain, but it’s estimated that 70 to 90 townspeople lost their lives of the 100 that lived in the town of Frank at the time.

Residents were killed in the wee hours of the morning when 110 million tonnes of rock broke off and slid down Turtle Mountain, obliterating the town, the nearby Canadian Pacific Railroad and parts of a coal mine in less than two minutes.

While Joe Little undoubtedly profited from his innovation, the site now lies abandoned. And its construction, a mere six years after the tragedy at Frank, is a recipe for an angry ghost or two.

It’s hard to tell if any spirits are hanging around Bellevue’s Lime City. You’ll have to make the drive out there to see for yourself. Let us know what you find!