Wild Horse Creek.Īfter driving for what seemed like an eternity, I came to a ‘turnoff’ which was really nothing more than an eroded bank leading down to the Wildhorse River. I drove on and on into the mountains, praying that I wouldn’t run into another vehicle bound for Fort Steele. This dirt road (which, in retrospect, must have been the Fort Steele-Wildhorse Road) was a bit of a one-way trail, and I had little choice but to follow it until it widened sufficiently to allow me to turn my car around. Near a gas station graced by one of those goofy cutout board inviting passersby to transplant their faces onto the vacant countenance of a faceless prospector, I ended up taking a wrong turn and heading up a narrow and somewhat precarious logging road which runs along a cliff overhanging the Wild Horse River. A bridge over Wild Horse Creek.Īfter enjoying the sights and sounds of Fort Steele, I set out to get a photo of the confluence of the Kootenay and Wild Horse Rivers, where an old CPR railway station once stood. Today, visitors to Fort Steele can walk down the raised wooden sidewalks past horse drawn carriages, a steam engine locomotive, and actors dressed in period costume who appear baffled by the size of your tiny camera.įort Steele, British Columbia. Although the original settlement dwindled into a ghost town in the early 1900s, a true-to-life replica of the frontier community was built in the late 1960s and opened to the public as the Fort Steele Heritage Town, a living museum designed to imitate Fort Steele as it appeared in the 19 th Century. The settlement acquired its new name in 1888, when the famous Mountie Sam Steele came to town to settle a contentious dispute between a local prospector and a Kootenai Indian whom he accused of murder (Fort Steele was never a ‘fort’ in the truest sense of the term, although it did house a NWMP outpost). Sam Steele.įort Steele was once a town called Galbraith’s Ferry, established in 1864 by a ferry operator named John Galbraith, who made his living transporting prospectors across the Kootenay River.
About halfway through my trip, I decided to pay a visit to Fort Steele, a living history museum just up the B.C. That summer, I took a week-long solo road trip through the Canadian Rockies, in part for the purpose of acquiring photos for my own website. I’m going to tell you a story about a little adventure I had in the summer of 2014, which led to my accidental discovery of a ghost town in the wilderness of southern British Columbia.
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