Watching the Paint Peel, Blairmore

At the Greenhill mine in Crowsnest Pass, the abandoned wash house was still standing until the past couple of years. For a long time it was full of thousands of core samples drilled decades before, made to sample the sub-surface geology that was later developed by the mine. Why the samples were left here when the mine shut down, I can’t say. Within the past few years, prolonged neglect caused the main part of the wash house to start collapsing, and the majority of the building was taken down and removed. During that time, the core samples were removed as well. One of the few remaining parts of the wash house that’s still semi-intact is this back room of stalls. The light coming through smashed, boarded-up windows shines on little more than peeling paint, a few pipes, broken porcelain fixtures, and shattered scraps of cylindrical core samples.