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Elbow Falls does not need a long walk to earn the stop. From the upper railing the whole drop is in front of you: the Elbow River cutting through the limestone, a short white fall into a green pool, and the valley opening out behind it toward forested hills already turned yellow. This clip is only a few seconds. The camera barely moves. That is about right for the place on a clear fall day. The aspen and the shrubs along the gravel bars are gold, the spruce stays dark, and the sky is the hard blue you get in the Elbow Valley once the weather settles. A few people are on the stairs and the lower rail, which is the usual crowd here. It is an easy pull-off, not a backcountry day. Elbow Falls sits on the Elbow River in Kananaskis Country, off Highway 66 west of Bragg Creek. The day-use area has viewpoints, stairs down toward the canyon, and picnic spots. A Kananaskis Conservation Pass is required to park. In spring the same ledge is a brown torrent. In October it is this: lower water, clear pools, and the hills lit up behind the rock. Worth the drive out from Calgary if the larches and aspen are turning. Stand at the rail, watch the river take the corner, and leave the long hikes for another day.  #ElbowFalls #Kananaskis #ElbowRiver #Alberta, #autumn
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 High River Alberta Balloon Glow The field at Wallaceville sits quiet until the fans start. Crews unload baskets, spread the envelopes, and walk the fabric open with big cold-air fans before anyone touches a burner. It takes more people than it looks like from the road. One person on the fan, others on the mouth of the balloon, more on the crown line, and somebody already in the basket watching the shape. Cold air only gets the envelope off the grass. The burners do the rest. A short test blast, then longer ones. Hot air rises, the fabric stands, and the basket tips upright under it. They balance the heat so the balloon stays planted — tethered to the truck, glowing, not going anywhere. The field stays closed while that happens. Once the envelopes are stable and the lines are clear, the barriers come down and the crowd walks in among them. That is the Balloon Glow at the Heritage Inn International Balloon Festival in High River. No launch that evening. The point is the light and the noise. Burners hit in sequence across the field and the fabric lights from the inside — reds, yellows, odd sponsor colours, a few shapes you only catch when the flame is on. On a cool September night the heat off the baskets is real. You feel it on your face when you walk past. The sound is closer to a dragon than a propane torch, especially when several fire at once. Pilots and crews come from across Canada, the northern U.S. (Wyoming shows up regularly), and further. The festival runs several days of morning and late-afternoon flights out of the same Wallaceville site — Centre Street across the bridge north of Sobeys — weather permitting. Passenger rides sell out early. The Glow itself is free, no ticket, usually Friday from about 5 to 9, with inflation closer to sunset and food vendors and music on the edges. Times move if the wind does. Check heritageinninternationalballoonfestival.com before you drive. The full walk-through, from the fan start to the raw burner audio once the field opens, is up on the KassDays channel: https://youtu.be/1sodAioelG0 High River is an easy run south of Calgary. Get there before the barriers drop if you want to watch the uprighting. After that you’re in the middle of it. See you on the road. Kass KassDays #HighRiver #BalloonGlow #HotAirBalloons #HeritageInnBalloonFestival #SouthernAlberta #ExploreAlberta #KassDays #TravelAlberta  The Fort Macleod NWMP Musical Ride with the horses was supposed to go live last week, but as a reminder it goes live today, the original post on that was already done last week. Had to switch a couple of videos around, apologies for the confusion.
Steam, Steel, and a Small Town Weekend: Pioneer Acres, Irricana This is Pioneer Acres Museum, just north of Irricana, Alberta, during their 56th Annual Show — billed in 2026 as Alberta’s Pioneer Steam Power Festival. August 7 to 9. If you like history and you like that small-town feel with a lot of knowledge packed behind it, this is the event. The machine in the photo is the one a lot of people came to see: a Case steam roller. J.I. Case of Racine, Wisconsin, built farm steam engines by the tens of thousands. They also built road rollers — 10-ton and 12-ton machines meant to pack gravel and asphalt, not plow a quarter section. Case made a few hundred of them between about 1905 and 1923. Very few still run. Organizers called this one of only three surviving Case steam rollers in the world, and the only one in Canada. Doug Callaghan brought a newly restored Case roller over from Kelowna for the weekend. On the field it looks like a traction engine that swapped its front wheels for a roller drum. Green boiler, CASE on the smokebox, red spoke wheels, CASE STEAM ROLLER on the coal bunker. Quiet when it is in steam. Heavy when it moves. That was the theme of the weekend. Pioneer Acres gathered steam traction engines from across Alberta — Case, Nichols & Shepard, Sawyer-Massey, George White — plus stationary engines, a Stanley Steamer, and a White steam car. Volunteers fire them, belt them to threshers, and work a crop the museum grows on purpose so you can watch harvest the old way. There were parades, tractor pulls, a wheelwright shop, blacksmiths, grain grinding, pancake breakfasts, and more antique iron parked in the yards than you can walk in one afternoon. More than 5,000 people came through. Steam built this part of the country before diesel did. These engines broke sod, ran threshing rings, and, in the roller’s case, packed the roads that tied the farms together. Most of them had a working life of ten or fifteen years. The ones still under pressure exist because someone kept the boiler legal and the knowledge alive. Irricana is a short run from Calgary. Pioneer Acres does this every August. 2027 is already pointed at rare and unusual makes. If you go, get there when the gates open. The good stuff is already hissing by 9. #SteamEngines #Irricana #PioneerAcres #KassDays  Steam Roller Irricana Alberta New 4K video now live on the KassDays YouTube channel Up Close at the Musical Ride & Behind the Scenes in the Stables! | Fort MacLeod The first public Musical Ride happened here. In 1876, North-West Mounted Police at Fort Macleod started putting their riding drills to music. It was a way to break the monotony of prairie patrol work — turns, charges, and precision work on horseback, done for each other and then for the town. That informal show is widely accepted as the starting point of a tradition that later became the RCMP Musical Ride. What you can still see inside the wooden palisade at the Fort Museum is not the touring RCMP troop with its black Hanoverians. It is the Fort’s own Mounted Patrol: a local re-enactment that has run on this ground since 1973. Riders wear replica 1870s red serge, white helmets, and carry lances. The horses are working stock, not the official Ride’s black parade horses. It is the only daily (seasonal) on-site Musical Ride of its kind in Canada, performed in the same town where the idea first took shape. This week’s video is a performance in the dirt arena, then a walk into the stables after the ride is over. What you’ll see in the video The camera stays close. You get the formations as they happen — riders in red against the palisade and watchtowers, lances up, horses moving as a unit on the packed dirt. After the performance, the video goes behind the rails into the barn. The horses are unsaddled, cooling out, and standing where visitors can actually see them as animals rather than as part of a drill. The clip is 9 minutes and 36 seconds. It is built to feel like you were sitting on the rail for the ride and then followed the horses home.
A short note on what this ride is The official RCMP Musical Ride still traces its roots to those 1876 exercises at Fort Macleod. The version at the museum is a living-history performance put on by the Fort Macleod Historical Association’s Mounted Patrol. Some riders are seasonal staff, including young riders in their first year. The program has been part of the Fort’s summer season for more than fifty years. If you have already watched the earlier walk-through of the compound — the goats at the gate, the boardwalks, the chapel, and the blacksmith shop — this video is the piece that was missing: the horses in motion, then the horses at rest. If you want to visit in person Fort Macleod is about a two-hour drive south of Calgary on Highway 2. The Fort Museum of the North-West Mounted Police and First Nations Interpretive Centre is at 219 Jerry Potts Blvd. The Musical Ride typically runs through the summer season, weather permitting, with more than one performance on operating days. Admission to the ride is included with museum entry. The museum also offers a hands-on “Saddle Up” / groom-a-horse experience in season, where visitors can help prep a horse and watch the inspection before the show. Hours and ride times change with the calendar. Check [nwmpmuseum.com](https://www.nwmpmuseum.com) before you go. Pair the stop with a walk down Fort Macleod’s Provincial Historic Main Street. See you on the road. Kass KassDays #FortMacleod #MusicalRide #NWMP #AlbertaHistory #KassDays #CanadianTradition #SouthernAlberta Below video will go live October 7th, 2026. There was a change in schedule.  High River Balloon Glow Video Instead Check out the High River Balloon Glow Festival instead, it was KassDays first time to such an event, truly loved it.
High River Balloon Festival — Morning on the Field, Glow Tonight I was on the Wallaceville field in High River this morning for the Heritage Inn International Balloon Festival. The envelopes came up anyway. Wind kept them from flying, but the crews still inflated the balloons so people could see them close: the big red one, the rainbow stripes, the cartoon dog with the pink bow, trailers and chase trucks lined along the edge. That is the part a launch photo never quite captures — how much fabric, how many hands, how fast they have to work when the air will not cooperate. A short clip from this morning is on the post, along with stills from the field. If you want the longer look, the livestream from the same stop is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h18mcRj8BmE Tonight: Balloon Glow, 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Same site — Wallaceville, Centre Street in High River, across the bridge north of Sobeys. Free. No ticket. Official plan:
Word on the field this morning was strong wind later. If they cannot fully inflate, they can still fire the burners. That is often enough for the glow: heat, noise, colour against a dark sky. Weather calls the final shot, so check the festival site or their socials before you drive in. If you go:
See you on the road. Kass KassDays #HighRiverBalloonFestival #HeritageInnInternationalBalloonFestival #BalloonGlow #HighRiver #KassDays #AlbertaEvents  Highway 3 through southwest Alberta is easy to treat as a through-road. That is a mistake. Between Lundbreck and Frank you can pull off for a waterfall, a centuries-old limber pine the community still props up, the ruins of a Canadian-owned coal plant, the memorial to Canada’s worst mining disaster, and the boulder field left by the Frank Slide. That compact loop is the new KassDays video: 5 Incredible Stops in Alberta (All Within 20 Minutes!) https://youtu.be/h8feqfWtB6Q Lundbreck Falls Just off Highway 3 at the Lundbreck Falls Provincial Recreation Area. The Crowsnest River drops about 12 metres in a short set of falls. Two viewing platforms sit near the parking area. A short stairway leads into the canyon if you want the mist and a lower angle. Picnic tables, fishing on the river, campground downstream. Day use is year-round. Stay out of the water above and immediately below the falls. The Heritage Burmis Tree A limber pine estimated at 600–750 years old. It died in the late 1970s, blew over in 1998, lost a branch to vandals in 2004, and still stands because locals and the province braced it with steel and glue. The highway was aligned around it. Pull-off on Highway 3 east of the Pass proper. Interpretive panel on site. Most photographed tree in the area. Look, photograph, leave it alone. Leitch Collieries Provincial Historic Site North side of Highway 3 near the east entrance to the Municipality of Crowsnest Pass. Built 1907 as a fully Canadian-owned coal and coke operation. Powerhouse, manager’s house, tipple works, a long row of coke ovens. The coal was poor for coke, markets collapsed, strikes and war finished it. Closed by 1916. Stabilized ruins, walking paths, interpretive panels. Donation in summer. Washrooms and picnic tables mid-May to Labour Day. Large parking lot. Dogs welcome. Hillcrest Mine Disaster Memorial June 19, 1914, 9:30 a.m. A methane ignition set off a coal-dust explosion. Of the men underground that morning, 189 died. Worst coal-mining disaster in Canadian history. Most were buried in mass graves at Hillcrest Cemetery. A later memorial at the entrance also names other Canadian mine disasters. Short drive off the highway into Hillcrest. Quiet site. Treat it as a cemetery first. Frank Slide April 29, 1903, 4:10 a.m. The east face of Turtle Mountain failed. Tens of millions of tonnes of limestone crossed the valley in about 90–100 seconds. Part of the town of Frank, the railway, and the mine plant were buried. Estimates of the dead run from about 70 to 90; most remain under the rock. Indigenous people already called it the mountain that moves. The scar and the debris field are still there. Marked paths cross the slide. The Frank Slide Interpretive Centre is the place for the full geological and human story if you have extra time. Practical notes Drive time between the outer stops is short. Weather in the Pass turns quickly — check 511 Alberta. Fuel in Pincher Creek, Blairmore, or Coleman. Pair the loop with the Interpretive Centre, Bellevue, or a longer stay in the Pass. Stay on marked paths at the ruins, cemetery, and slide. Full 4K walk-through with timestamps: https://youtu.be/h8feqfWtB6Q See you on the road. Kass KassDays #CrowsnestPass #Highway3 #AlbertaRoadTrip #LundbreckFalls #BurmisTree #LeitchCollieries #HillcrestMineDisaster #FrankSlide #AlbertaHistory #ExploreAlberta #KassDays #SouthwestAlberta #RoadsideAlberta
New video now live on the KassDays channel: I Thought I Had My Fortune Made | Exploring Leitch Collieries Ruins (Southern Alberta) Just off Highway 3 at the eastern edge of the Crowsnest Pass sit the stone ruins of a mine that was supposed to make its owners rich. Leitch Collieries lasted about eight years. Then it was gone. The site is easy to miss if you are flying through to Fernie or Banff. Slow down. The manager’s house still stands on its concrete piers like a skeleton that refused to fall over. Arched window openings, thick sandstone walls, no roof, no floors. You can walk right through it. This was one of the most ambitious coal operations in the Pass and the only one that was fully Canadian-owned and operated. William Hamilton and the Leitch family poured money into it starting in 1907. They built a powerhouse, a tall wooden washery, a tipple that could handle a thousand tons a day, and a row of 101 coke ovens. They even put in a gas-powered locomotive to haul coal cars from the mine mouth down the valley — unusual for the time. The coal itself was a problem. It did not coke well. Only a handful of those 101 ovens ever ran. A long strike in 1911 cost them customers, including the CPR. Then the First World War cut off markets and capital. The banks foreclosed in 1915. A buyer from Vancouver agreed to take the whole operation for a million dollars and then died before the deal closed. That was the end. The town of Passburg that grew up beside the works faded just as fast. Most of the houses were moved to Bellevue. The metal went for scrap in the Second World War. What remains are the stone walls, the foundations, and the story. The Alberta government stabilized the ruins and turned the place into a Provincial Historic Site. Walking paths loop through the powerhouse, past the coke-oven row, and up to the manager’s house. Interpretive plaques tell the timeline. Listening posts play recorded voices of miners and managers who actually worked here. You hear them talk about the work, the money they thought they would make, and how quickly it all disappeared. That is the part that stays with you. A full walk takes about an hour. The paths are gravel and mostly level. Picnic tables, a large parking lot that can handle RVs, washrooms in summer, and an off-leash dog area make it an easy stop. Admission is by donation. The site is self-guided year-round; staff and washrooms are there from mid-May to Labour Day. If you are already driving the Crowsnest Highway, pull in. The ruins sit against the hills with the highway humming just below. It is one of those places that looks like nothing from the road and then opens up once you step out of the truck. Watch the full walk-through here: https://youtu.be/T-_8R5Wx0QI See you on the road. Kass KassDays #LeitchCollieries #CrowsnestPass #AlbertaGhostTowns #AbandonedPlaces #KassDays #AlbertaHistory #CoalMiningAlberta #RoadTripAlberta
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