Alberta and Saskatchewan Spring 2025 — Sandra Herber Photography

The fabulous 50 French bakery in Okotoks.

In May (2025) I took a trip to Alberta. The first few days were planned - around Calgary and shooting with friends - but I had left the rest of the trip open. I ended up going into Saskatchewan so it became a spring in Alberta and Saskatchewan trip.

Most photographers, on arriving in Calgary, would immediately head west up into the Rockies but I headed east (and south) into the prairie landscape of eastern Alberta. The Rockies are undeniably gorgeous, but to me the open skies, the grain elevators and the minimalist landscapes of the Prairies are much more appealing.

My flight got in around midday and my first stop was the 50 French Bakery in Okotoks. Priorities! It was packed, with cars lining the street around it and parking was hard to find. I clearly wasn’t the first to discover this place. The offerings were not only beautiful, as you can see from the picture. A good bakery to start the trip!

A few storms with dramatic thunder came through while I was out shooting, making for lovely skies and muddy backroads (which looked worse than they actually were, thankfully). My reward at the end of a long first day were those wonderful patisseries from 50 French!

The next morning started off at a brisk 4C, and after a quick breakfast I met up with a local photographer whose work I really love - Kris Schofield - to go out shooting for the day. Before the trip, I had reached out to Kris to let him know I was going to be in Alberta and had asked if he would like to get together. To my joy, he was free to go out shooting for a day. What a treat it was to go out with such a great photographer and someone who knows the area like the back of his hand. We shot for the whole day (11 hours), drove 450 kilometers and I lost count of the number of great old, abandoned homesteads we visited. Probably my favourite memory of the day was the first house we shot at. As we were setting up our tripods in the quiet of the morning, a coyote started howling and yipping and that as well as birdsong, were the only sounds we heard as we photographed that abandoned old home. A magical moment on the Prairies. Going out with Kris was not only fun photographically - the driving was fun, too! Kris used to drive rally cars so he isn’t afraid to make fast turns on dirt roads and there were more than a few times I thought (and even said), “Wheeeee” as we sailed around corners at high speed.

I’m always happy to see the giant T-Rex in Drumheller

The next day my friend Len Langevin (who I hadn’t photographed with since 2018) drove down from his home south of Red Deer to meet up with me. Before meeting up with Len, I shot by myself south of Strathmore and around lunch time we met up in Vulcan, Alberta (which was named long before the Star Trek franchise, but seems to be taking full advantage of it). We spent the rest of the day photographing between Vulcan and Lethbridge.

I had found a site I thought had potential as I headed into Vulcan to meet Len, so we headed there first. As we were finishing up, a truck pulled up to see what we were doing. When we said we were just photographing and asked if that was OK, the fellow in the truck said it definitely was, he was just checking because he had some stuff stored in the old buildings. We assured him that we hadn’t gone into them (or really even near them) and then he said, “If you’re looking to photograph some old buildings, there’s a homestead on our property you could visit” and gave us directions. What a stroke of luck! We probably wouldn’t have found the place on our own, and it was great to have been given permission to photograph it. We felt comfortable spending a long time walking all around the wonderful old buildings and avoiding the abandoned well that he had warned us about. Falling into a hidden well is my worst nightmare out here!

A series of storms rolled in in the afternoon, making for some dramatic skies and at the end of the day we had a lovely dinner in a very cool converted water tower overlooking Lethbridge, capping off a really good day.

Len decided to stay in Lethbridge another day and we started off that day with a visit to the High Level Bridge, which I had marvelled at on our way into town on Tuesday. It was completed in 1909 and is the largest railway trestle bridge in the world! In the late morning we headed off on a circular route west of town to visit some sites I had marked on my scouting map. Before the photography, though, we had to make an important first stop: the Coaldale Bakery. What a treat! It is a Dutch bakery which carries all sorts of products from Holland and fresh baked goods. I had the donut of the week: a raspberry lemon fritter - which was outstanding. We spent the rest of the day photographing some great old elevators, and just like the day before, some storms rolled in the afternoon. Temperatures were all over the place – from too warm to wear a jacket to bitter cold with a fierce wind. Alberta in the springtime! At the last few spots we photographed we were pelted by cold rain and wild winds. It was not the most enjoyable shooting, but we photographed some great sites. Thanks go to Len for doing all the driving, sharing his banana bread and being very patient with my and my time-consuming long exposures.

After Len left to return home, I was on my own for the rest of the trip.

The next day was two-bakery day (along with some great elevators and other sites)! I planned a circle drive – south, then west, then back to Lethbridge. Before the photography, though, I stopped in at a lovely French bakery in Lethbridge called The Little Bakehouse. The salted caramel cromboloni was out of this word! After leaving Lethbridge, I headed south of town to photograph grain elevators (including Raley - the oldest elevator still standing in Alberta, built in 1905) and a couple of abandoned homesteads along the way. My second bakery was the lovely Homestead Bakery in Fort Macleod. I dawdled too long (those long exposures take time!) at one elevator, so I arrived at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump just after it closed. That was disappointing – but it was still cool to see it from a distance. This was the farthest west I would get on this trip and I had some nice views of the Rockies in the distance before turning back to Lethbridge for the night.

The landscape west of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump was so beautiful.

The next day I moved from Lethbridge further east to Medicine Hat. I took many detours along the way and photographed some great elevators and old homesteads between bouts of pouring rain. If it was clear, I did long exposures, if not, I shot quickly handheld. At one point, I was photographing along the train tracks when a truck pulled up and a young many got out and walked along the tracks to throw the switch. Afterwards, he (Cade) and I chatted for a while and he told me those switches are probably over a hundred years old so they had to be thrown by a person. Even though the track was laid in 1913, he’d seen stamps on the tracks dated 1897! That area of the line is now closed (and only used for storage), but he told me that it once carried trains all the way to Manyberries (such a great name!) and into Saskatchewan.

In the afternoon, I visited what ended up being the last bakery of the trip - The Rolling Pin in Bow Island - and picked up a cinnamon bun. It was a good day, but a long day. It was only when I got to Medicine Hat that I realized how tired I was. After I checked in to my hotel, I went back to my car to get my bags – at least I thought it was my car. I tried multiple times to get into it, before finally realizing it wasn’t mine!

The next day was another travel day: this time from Medicine Hat, Alberta to Kindersley, Saskatchewan – a trip that would normally take 2 ½ hours but which took 8 hours with detours and stops for photography. As I mentioned before, this trip was a little different from the ones I usually take to the Prairies. Usually I have a good idea what areas I want to target and and I often book hotels in advance of arriving. This trip I planned the first few days, but left the last half of the trip open. After lots of thought, I dismissed the idea of going into Montana and instead headed to Saskatchewan.

At one stop on my way to Kindersley, where I was photographing a collapsing church, a truck pulled up with a couple and a barking dog in it. “Just taking photographs?” the fellow in the driver’s seat asked, after telling the dog to shush multiple times to no effect. “Yes,” I responded. “If you like taking pictures of things that are falling down [I do, I thought!], there’s a barn a ways over you might like”. He gave me directions – in miles: “6 miles that way, then turn right and go one mile that way”. The grid system of roads on the Prairies was created long before we switched to the metric system: Township Roads (running east-west) are spaced 2 miles (3.2 kms) apart and Range Roads (running north-south) are spaced a mile apart (1.6 kms), so it’s still easier to give directions in miles. I appreciated his recommendation – that barn was very cool! After another long day of driving, I arrived in Kindersley.

The next day I drove north and west of Kindersley to visit some great old grain elevators – some of which I photographed 12 years ago on my first trip to the Prairies. I remember thinking at the time that it would be a one-off trip, but I unexpectedly connected with this place – the space, the skies, the elevators, the people - and have come back once or twice a year every year since (except during the pandemic). Photographing out here has become a big part of my photographic life.

As I was shooting the elevator in Superb, a man drove up on a motorcycle. It turns out that the elevator is now owned by his (Darren’s) son-in-law and he told me some great stories about the happy days when the elevator was still operational (“Can you imagine – we only had to haul our grain to there, just there!”), when there was a post office, general store and even a school in Superb. We talked a bit about the elevator, which is one of my favourites and which I first photographed in 2013 (and again in 2014). He bemoaned the fact that the bits of tin blow off in storms and that water is starting to get inside now, but it is still an icon in the area. He told me that that if there’s fog or blowing snow when his family go snowmobiling in the winter, they navigate their way home by the elevator. When I told him that I had come out from Toronto to photograph elevators, he insisted on going back home to get an old (1973) map of all the Sask Pool elevators in the province, which we marvelled over together. I love these serendipitous encounters with the people who live here, and who know and love this land so much.

It was a good day photographically, but it wasn’t a pleasant day. There was a violent wind which tipped over my tripod (let’s see if those long exposures even work!) and made shooting a bit unpleasant. At the end of the day, I found a tick (a dog tick, I believe) crawling on my sleeve and after taking a picture to identify it, I flicked it off into the parking lot at the Save On where I hope it starved to death. After checking, I don’t think any of its little friends embedded themselves on me, but that still wasn’t a pleasant end to the day.

The next day was my last full day of the trip and I took advantage by travelling north and west of Kindersley to visit some elevators, ghost towns and to find what I could find on the way. My first stop was Hoosier, which has a lovely old Anglican church and an abandoned school. As I was photographing the church, the town greeter – a relaxed, but very friendly, lab – came up and nuzzled my hand. As he left, I looked over to my left and saw I was being watched by a little girl who asked my name. We chatted a while and she showed me a dead snake she said had been killed a few days ago.

After that it was just me and lots of driving and photographing. Along the way I found many abandoned homesteads to photograph. As I was shooting a long exposure at one of them, I was struck by the lovely sound of birdsong. I’m not a bird person, so I pulled out my Merlin app to see which birds it would identify. There were two types of swallows - a barn swallow and a clay-colored swallow - a goldfinch (even I can identify those by sight), a robin, a red-winged blackbird and a yellow warbler. Quite the gathering!

After a lovely long day, I arrived in Hanna, Alberta where I stayed my last night.

The next day - the day of my flight home - I managed to fit in a lovely brunch in Calgary with Kathryn Audet, a photographer I know through Instagram. It was great to meet her and talk Prairie photography.

This was a trip of two parts: part cold (8C-10C) and rainy and part warm (26C-28C) and sunny; part with company (three days) and part on my own (seven days) – but all of it was a fun adventure and I hope there are some great images on the big camera!

Travel Stories

Latest Posts