Canada’s Famous Abandoned City. Remote and Untouched. Adventure #48

I think for most people, a dream destination is going to be something they've seen on Instagram or Facebook, maybe they've heard about it talking at the water cooler at work, but for me, a dream destination is going to be something that few people have. I've heard that even fewer people have seen it and it starts with a six-hour trip that takes you about halfway to the middle of nowhere, followed by a six-hour ferry ride that only leaves once a year. the week and completes its journey to the middle of nowhere. but come down, the clock is ticking.

Oh, good luck and I have nothing. If you're the only person I've ever met who used to set it up from the bottom up, we'll train you, there's nothing wrong with that. keep straight while the world is, we'll raise next time you take a trip to the middle of nowhere for this before you're gone nine dollars, that's the end of the pavement, we just stopped to get windshield washer fluid and the car is like a icicle. mud cycle we are at the top of Bella Coola Hill completely walled with snow and this is the only kind of sketchy part we will have on this trip, so all the locals will know it, but anyone who is not local Bella Coola Hill is notoriously bad, so fingers crossed for a good descent, what do you think of the descent so far?

It's good, it's really good. Actually, I'm not even hitting the brakes. The cars just do everything everyone told me. Don't take the Jetta there, this jet is. We are doing very well, we have lost a mud flap, but otherwise spectacular, wasn't it because of all these practices? Yes, Noah the radish, you want to rest. Welcome to Bella Coola, one of my favorite places. An extremely beautiful place. This is the first time I've done it. Been here in summer hey this is the first time I've been here in winter and it's just as beautiful in winter as it is in summer, we have a lot of time to kill here now because the fairy doesn't leave until 5am. m., so I don't know what we're going to do, go to the bar, have a beer, eat a burger, so what are we doing?

Sorry, waiting for the ferry. They said we had to register at least 90 minutes in advance. I sure would like it. Don't make us wake up at 3 a.m. m. I'm here and wait two hours. We were here before the group for 30 years registering. Oh no, we are very lucky to live in a country and province where we have access. to something like this and it actually only costs $46.00 for the ferry ride. I now work on cruise ships so I am very lucky to be able to travel all over the world and very few places in the world are as beautiful as the ferry ride from Bella.

From Coola to Ocean Falls come back tomorrow, you know it's not enough that I can make you laugh, why try to spend more time than you ever have? During the six-hour ferry ride, we didn't see a single boat, we didn't see another person. There are no roads, there are no buildings, it's just miles and miles of beautiful pristine forests and mountains, as far as you can see, there's always something I can try to change, but you know why, car, you change the world just by getting here. Oh balls, before you start exploring. This episode of the destination

adventure

is sponsored by the company North Designs.

This is a company that I have been a fan of for a long time. You've seen a lot of her equipment in my videos before and I'm very excited to work with her. them and we proudly support their product Falls is extremely

remote

we are a minimum of four and a half to five and a half hours by ferry from Bella Coola it is actually only fifty-seven miles by water we are twenty-four miles by water from Bella Bella, We have no roads here, there is no way to drive a vehicle here, the only way to get in here is by water, by air, and if it is by air, it has to be a seaplane because of course we have no runway.

I just uploaded some maps and some information, so we'll give you the Grand Tour of Ocean Falls. We're on Front Street right now, it's Main Street and it goes around 10th Street and what you see here is most of these. They've fallen down, but these are the garden apartments, then there are the upper apartments, so we'll explore those and then where I am now, it used to be a strip of houses and it was sort of like VIP luxury houses. here's the old bank, that's where we're staying, it's actually bed and breakfast from time to time, the fancy hotel in the back, so I'm really excited to explore there a little bit and then on this side we have the fire station just on the other side.

From these buses we won't be able to get to this other side because everything is closed because there is a business in this building right here, but this used to be part of the old pulp mill, an old

abandoned

building, this house that was coming up. Here, this used to be the company house, so VIPs and presidents of the company and so on would come, they could stay here and now it's been restored inside and out and someone lives here full time. This is a really cool place. and probably the only example you will see, most of the paths here were made of wood and in fact you can see here remains of the old wooden path made by these residents.

Here's a better angle of the boardwalk or road and this was most of the road in Ocean Falls and then the residents here and a lot of these houses were actually built on stilts oh well what you have there Kurt this would have been the school, this building here and it's private property, so we're not going to go in. that one, but here on the other side was the playground and up on the hillside it would have been more residential, but it's hard to map it out because everything gets overgrown so quickly, this here obviously a church no longer has a service Curtis, what cream, cream, some cookies.

I'm eating this big building we see here, this green one, originally it was a women's dormitory and they called it a chicken coop, after that it became a hospital and now several people bought it and ran it as a hostel, but since What I heard It's just that the roof has a big leak so it's slowly deteriorating again so I hope they can fix it because it's still in good condition. In this area that we're in now there was a big slide that happened here and went through. road many years ago, but this used to be what is called a

city

and unfortunately here in Canada we have a bad history with the Japanese internment camps and all the Japanese that worked here lived in this whole section that was called a

city

and during the war, they were all taken away and put in internment camps, it's a terrible thing what the government has done, but it's part of the history here, so I wanted to point out that there is nothing left, you can't really see anything, just this wall back here and maybe if we walked around here you could see something, but when this was here there were a lot of buildings on stilts and over the years, once everything started falling into the ocean, divers went through it and found medicine bottles . and things like that with Japanese writing, so it's a good part of the history here, so Ocean Falls gets a tremendous amount of rain and anything here that's made of wood is pretty much completely destroyed now, even the people who own houses here Apparently within three years, if not maintained well, they are completely destroyed just by the rain, but we are lucky that many of these buildings were built with bricks and cement and have been maintained quite well, so that is mainly our fault.

We will visit today Ocean Falls is a town that has a great history, it was a company town, the lost company that owned it was Crown Zellerbach, they sold it to the BC government and the BC government eventually had to close it for economic reasons shortly. After the lockdown they decided to, as they call it, normalize the city, which basically meant that the government didn't want the responsibility of all the houses, they didn't want the maintenance of all the infrastructure that was here, so even though there were still a lot of people who lived here and wanted to continue living here with the belief that there was no way the paper mill would never operate again, the government decided to demolish and burn everything that we would enter and check. room, oh, there's an old vacuum cleaner in here, that's cool, I love that paint color, oh, and the wallpaper is too amazing, flowers pretty dated and in good condition, that's cool, you know what I expected, this would be much worse.

Wow, this is great, look at this living room. I love this design, amazing view and there is a whole row of these houses so it looks like one of them could have some things. Oh, we have an upstairs for this cool little Harry Potter closet and these stairs look to be in good condition, so go up and take a look, see, you know what, let's say a bad looking place, this house, possibly It could be one of those scenarios where someone owns it, bought it as a vacation spot or something, but they haven't been coming often. enough for maintenance and then unfortunately it just falls into disrepair due to the amount of rain they get because it's in better shape than I thought but it can't be recovered again unfortunately they basically came with a fleet of Las Bulldozers tore it all down, piled it up and burned the few buildings that remained either privately owned or sold by the government to private investors at the time they came here.

This is one of the government buildings I was talking about, will our the post office at the end and then the courthouse and jail in the middle and they are no longer working but you can still see very well maintained waiters waiting for food in the post office, your cats here. Ocean Falls basically became a paper town because of the two. One of the reasons is that the quality of the water that comes out of Lake Link is just incredible, it's so pure that they didn't have to filter it to make white paper, which is unheard of, it's phenomenal and the other was literally that the falls offered the opportunity to generate electricity being able to generate electricity here themselves made it possible for the paper factory to exist originally there were several forced gates there is only one of them that is actually used to generate energy at this time they are original from 1926 that is when they were installed , I get it, and other than digitizing all the controls, it's exactly as it was when it was built in the 1920s.

Pretty phenomenal technology that's still very functional and very, very applicable by today's standards. I'm in this building under the waterfall here look at this this is really cool it's an old telephone this actually used to be the pump house that pumped water to Ocean Falls and there's still almost everything left here this old gasoline engine the pumps and the pipes everything it's really really cool, all the switches flip, everything really cool, there are a couple of buildings behind me here that we'd really like to see, but as you can see, it's closed, that's because this big blue building directly behind me , the second floor of that building, is a The giant Bitcoin mining operation is a really fascinating story that is happening here in Hoshin Falls because this power plant produces so much energy that they can do it

remote

ly, so the entire second floor has like 500 computer units or something like that, we were hoping to go in and check. that, but the guy who runs it left on the last ferry that left here, so we won't be able to verify it, but it's still super fascinating the Bitcoin operation that arrived, which is blockchain technology, has bought rights to a lot. of power generation and that really helped Borel complexes throughout their most intact state, yeah, let's wait, here we go, so take the elevator or the stairs, that floor is spongy, so I guess this would have been an apartment here, the door that goes in here would have than being in the kitchen, stepping on a nail.

There won't be a tetanus shot within a hundred miles of here and I guess maybe a view of the living room would have been great, in fact very nice in the past, down the hall here would be the bathroom, you would see the bathtub up to that would have been around here and So I guess this has probably been a two-bedroom flat, one and two, very cool on the ground floor, yeah, it sure is beautiful here. It's okay, I like to go to the top. Oh d'Or, wow, I can't believe some of these rooms still have doors open. a mine and this one is still locked with the room number, which is surprising, so this will be the last floor and a lot of water will come in through here.

I don't want to spend too much time here, this building is cement, but this is cool, the old exit sign, very cool, go back, one of the most interesting parts of Ocean Falls still has road signs. I love that this court is no longer very level, this is pretty cool, you can still see the lines in the asphalt of this court here. very good, thanks to the people who commented on my vernonia video. Now I know this is holly,thank you. This is the most

famous

building in Ocean Falls. This is a big fancy hotel and in the past it used to be very very fancy.

It has a warning in front not to enter. We've also been warned by people staying not to go in there, but we'll do our best to snoop around a bit. I don't think we will. I climb too high, too many floors, but we'll definitely go in to check it out. I'm going to get in here as much as I can. It's very dark, but I know that there used to be a very large and elegant hall here, even the stairs are very beautiful. I don't know what kind of rock it is. It's very pretty. Just try not to get my feet too wet.

I think this.It may have been the bowling alley it's hard to tell and now this roof is caved in and unfortunately I'll see if I can get there so yeah where I am here I'm pretty sure it's the old bowling alley it could have been the living room . Oh wow, this is a cool little bar setup here yeah, so I'm still not sure if it was a room with a bowling alley in it, but it's really cool, let's see if we can get to the other side so you guys get a really good understanding of it.

What is hapening here. rotten and I really don't feel like falling down, I'm not sure what that nice big door was about, cheers, very very cool, so I've gone as far as I'm comfortable with, the floor is actually very soft under me and I'm usually Pretty brave about these things, but we're so far out in the middle of nowhere, if something happens here, there's no help, so I don't want to push too hard. It's a shame I won't be able to go up. Unfortunately, this building is too high because I was really excited about this one.

That's supposed to be the main thing here. I don't transfer this to infrared. It's possible that you guys can see a little better. Here we go. Old cash register. It's total darkness here, so I can't see anything, but the infrared camera picks up pretty well, that's really cool, see and see more down here, not much going on here, ah, the old elevator, that's really cool, what's up ? Yes, this is a baby. building yes, I think I can get there, what a great kitchen here mm-hmm, I'm not sure what this building is, maybe this is the old cooperative they were talking about, don't go, what are the dishes for, this is look exactly like this. an old UPS truck, there are a lot of problems, we have some

abandoned

buildings that absolutely need to be torn down and cleaned up, some of them have some environmental risks, some of them have serious health risks, like asbestos and lead, and several others.

Know the dangers that we have in that sense, we have some absentee owners that are not really doing anything with their properties and they are allowing nature to take its course and the buildings are collapsing and you know, allowing some of those toxins to basically still be exists here, I'd really like to see a lot of it cleaned up. I just looked up at the hotel and this was blowing in the window and it looked like a woman in a dress looking at me from the hotel here and OH, bowling shoes, that's cool, but there's another entrance, oh wow, it looks like it's in a little better condition, it's not great, but it's better, so we'll see if I can find something here, some stairs or something.

I turned it over to you. infrared so it'll be black and white but I'll still be able to see a lot better and that's down and nothing up top okay so I'm not sure how to get up here hmm I don't know them I'm trying my best to do this. I work for you, but I don't know if I'll be able to get up there, so there's been a men's room, a urinal there and a sink here hmm, I don't know what's going on here, this rug ends and then it has this square. tile and then back to carpet, I don't know, and also on the ceiling there was something different.

There is a lot of hype about this hotel when I was reading about this place, when people tell me about it, it's not that great. I don't know, I mean the bowling alley and the banquet hall and that was all very nice, but other than that this hotel is completely destroyed, there is almost nothing to see. I'm sure in the past it would have been very pretty and elegant. but no it's definitely not what I would call the highlight when you visit a place as remote as Ocean Falls you expect the locals to be a bit strange well this could be true the only thing I found in Ocean Falls that doesn't You don't find in most places is friendliness and a real sense of community, you have to understand that this is a place where money doesn't really have much value because you can't buy anything, there are no shops there, the only thing you can really buy.

Ocean Falls is freezing, that's the only thing other than that, if the community needs something, the residents are the ones who will do it in the future. I would like to see Ocean Falls grow to a level that is sustainable for purchasing real estate here. The cheapest real estate in Oceanside you can buy anywhere for a livable home, but each one will need a renovation. Someone who's going to come here has to be able to do that kind of thing. I would like, I would like to see. There are more people who are able and willing to integrate into this in the community and contribute to the community.

If we have a break in the water main, they are out there digging it up and fixing it. I know this because I drive the excavator with this kind of lifestyle. A really remote lifestyle seems very strange to most people, especially you can't buy anything, it's very abnormal, but I think if you just sit down and study it, it would be quite difficult to find something so reliable with so much potential, I guess. For lack of a better term, the real world is very difficult to put into words what Ocean Falls is really like, and until someone comes here and experiences it, it is described as addictive.

If you come here, you will really love it and it is. a high percentage chance that you will really like it or if you are a city type person you will hate it because there are no stars here, there is no liquor store, there are no services of any kind if you are not comfortable with yourself. If you're not comfortable with your own company or very limited company, you need a great place to yourself, but if you really love the outdoors, if you love fresh air, clean water, quiet and solitude, there is no place like this.

It's, it's heaven, sup, hey, we're depending on you, let's play Puddle Rock, there's not much to do here, this is what's happening in Ocean Falls, little Poe Rock, a place in Puddle Rock, yeah, it's well, what if I get a glass? You can use whatever you want and then play Bottle Rock I want to thank everyone for tuning in for another episode of Destination Adventure. Don't forget that you can now win all kinds of great gifts from Destination Adventure. Just check out the link in the description and while I'm down there, I have a link to our sponsor, still North's design code, so go over there and check out their stuff too and make sure to tell them that Dustin sent you, as always, Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints and I will catch you.

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