On the Sunday of our long weekend camping trip Paisley, Denise and I headed east of Drumheller to the Atlas Coal Mine. I have been to this coal mine before and it still captures my imagination as it boasts the only standing wooden coal tipple left in Canada.
When I visited this site three years ago the tipple was in better condition than it is today but I can see evidence that there has been some dollars and work that has gone into other areas of the mine site. For example three years ago we took a "tipple tour" inside the wooden structure and we rode the rails in one of the coal cars. That was about all you could do with your admission fare.
Today you can also don a miners hat, switch on the lamps and journey into the hillsides up one of the mine shafts. That is a new attraction and one that we decided we just had to do. Carrying around the heavy battery packs and wearing the heavy mining hats gave us a whole new appreciation for some of the conditions miners worked in back in the day. We couldn't have asked for a better tour of the Atlas Coal Mine site and I will be going back again and again!
To wind up our day crawling around a coal mine we drove out to the town of Wayne for a cold beer on the patio at the Last Chance Saloon. Wayne itself isn't anything spectacular (only 27 people live there); what is unique is the 11 steel bridges you must cross in the 6 kilometres it takes you to drive to the town from the main highway. It's not hard to imagine yourself as part of the Wild West in a place like Wayne!
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