merry christmas!

Merry Christmas from Vanished Compass and SaskUrbex!

 Our annual Christmas trip to a town hall full of Christmas decorations for our group picture.

churches of size

I had heard about a small Ukrainian church that I had missed photographing in an area I am very interested in. I spent a couple days planning a possible route and when the opportunity came up SaskUrbex and I went out to check things out. Because the light fades fast we had to start picking and choosing what we wanted to photograph as the sun was fading and the amount of churches and schools in the area had become overwhelming. We stopped to visit what we thought would be the most interesting. It was a very productive day and here are some of my favorite photos!

Highlights:

- finding so many churches
- accessing a large church, abandoned but completely intact
- finding the largest bible I have ever seen in my life
- photographing a very large furnace with coal bucket beside it
- ringing the bell in a bell tour
- shooting some video of these locations
- getting out of the house and hitting the grids!

hill billy ghost town

I went up to my cabin and decided to do some exploring in the area. The area north of my cabin is what people like to call "hill billy country". It's full of small, mostly abandoned towns where people will live in virtually any type of housing and most run on wood stoves. This area is also full of hunters during the right season as it is quite forested. I spent a few hours driving through some of the towns and came across this one, a small quaint town full of abandoned houses and buses convereted into homes.. thats right - a bus house.

driving the rail line

Went up to my cabin, took a few hours to drive the old rail line and came across a few interesting ghost towns, abandoned churches, hall, school, etc. There was only so far we could go until we reached a place where they removed a bridge. We enjoyed the time we had searching for long abandoned locations.