Month: July 2024

Coal Mining History and Heritage Conservation at the Bellevue Mine

Jared

Written by: Fraser Shaw, Heritage Conservation Advisor and Allan Rowe, Historic Places Research Officer

The Crowsnest Pass is a landscape of remarkable history and exceptional natural beauty in southwest Alberta. Highway 3 winds through the mountain corridor past the former site of the West Canadian Collieries Mine, where an enormous tipple once straddled rail spurs on what is now the highway. The tipple and above-ground operations were dismantled after the mine’s closure in 1961 but the distinctive concrete portals remain and are clearly visible from the road. Now a historic site, the Crowsnest Pass Ecomuseum Trust Society owns and operates an interpretive facility and maintains a portion of the main tunnel where public tours and thousands of visitors experience an underground mine that historically extended for kilometres along the coal seams.

The Bellevue Mine in June 2024 retains its distinctive paired portals with the name and construction date cast into the concrete facade. The portals and tipple walkway, a remnant of which survives beside the portal today (arrows), both appear in a 1951 photograph in the Provincial Archives of Alberta looking south from the escarpment (above right). Above left, an image of West Canadian Collieries from the collection of the Crowsnest Archives looks north to Bellevue, with stairs ascending the steep slope from the tipple and portal complex (not visible) to the wash house on the ridge above. Source: Historic Resources Management Branch.

Designated as a Provincial Historic Resource in 2011, the former mine exemplifies the early mining history of the Crowsnest Pass and represents industrial practices and technologies at one of Alberta’s most significant underground mining operations in this important historic coal-producing region.

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